Welcome to Douglas Wilson's Blog and May Blog, presented by Canon Press.

When everything starts to converge on the point, October 18, 2023, introduction, I would

like to thank Michael Riley for his respectful discussion of the relationship of Vantils

apologetic approach on the one hand and Christian nationalism on the other.

His article can be found here.

As a fellow Vantilian, albeit not a purest Vantilian, and somewhat smudgy on natural

law, I agreed with pretty much everything Riley said until right near the end of his article.

But he has laid things out in such a way as that I believe we can discuss the difference

here with some profit.

Let's give it a go, shall we?

After I set this up, I will get to my interactions with Riley in the section below and title

the Arm of the Enemy, the folks in the bleachers.

But I need to set the context first.

We have been doing our thing here in Moscow for some decades now.

I just had the privilege of describing that work in ministry for the American Conservative,

which description can be found here.

For many years, we were cultivating our own distinctive embassies here on the ground, but

we were largely frozen out of some of the larger national doings.

We were not allowed, for example, to have a booth at the big reformed evangelical festival.

Our name for all of this was the embargo.

This embargo was pretty effective at least initially, but it had some pretty deep benefits

for us.

...