Deneen, the "Christian Nationalist"?

Recently a gaggle of Milwaukee religious figures--including a Capuchin priest--inveighed against "Christian nationalists" (whatever they might be.)

Could Patrick Deneen, author of Regime Change, a new book reviewed here, be one of those.........ahhh............."Christian Nationalist" creatures?

...Deneen’s central argument is that the American regime needs a new elite. What distinguishes our elite from “every previous elite” is its “near complete lack of reflection upon its relationship to the lower and working classes.” Deneen is aware of how elites go out of their way to “leverage privilege” or “be an ally”—he is a university professor, after all—but he dismisses those efforts as a futile attempt to sidestep the question of class...insofar as liberal elites seek the betterment of the working class, they are less interested in serving it than in erasing it altogether. At its most benign, this looks like left-wing activists promoting affirmative action or young libertarians repeating ad nauseum that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” At its worst, this mentality is reflected in the left’s promotion of abortion, especially for poor black people, or the right’s celebration of creative destruction....

And now we get to that horrific "Christian" part:

 ...Regime Change’s real claim is that our political order has failed to achieve even modest objectives and is thus already unstable. Regime change has already occurred. To substantiate this claim, Deneen leans on the example of John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity (1630), arguing that America’s original founding—for him, its Christian founding—understood people’s talents as “gifts bestowed to individuals so that they might in turn be contributions for the benefit of the whole community.” Today’s liberal elites invert this. Most contemporary understandings of the Declaration of Independence, Deneen claims, assert that “to secure our individual rights, we establish something common—our nation. Thus, that which is common (the nation), serves our differences (our rights).” 

This inversion ends up reserving human flourishing for the elite, thus bizarrely echoing [Nietzscheian] vitalism. Really, the only difference between vitalist and liberal elites under Deneen’s framework is that the former acknowledges its self-serving behavior and the latter does not. In opposition to this vision (which merely reprises the pagan worldview that Christianity is obsolete), Deneen looks to Winthrop, Martin Luther King Jr., and a “whole nonliberal tradition of public spiritedness and communal responsibility” that was “lauded by Tocqueville” and focused on “restraining the temptation of the high, mighty, and wealthy to unjustly and selfishly benefit from their gifts.” ...

Summary and substance of Deneen's book?

 ...Regime Change is about how a society’s elite ought to conduct itself. Deneen’s answer: An elite must aspire to provide common goods—public moral and material utilities, such as prayer in public life [!!!!] and access to clean water—that make a virtuous life not just possible for an elite few, but probable for normal people. ...

You can read the entire review and not find Deneen disparaging "America."

So he reminds us of the Christian-principled founding and holds hope for the nation?

Maybe that Capuchin should give Deneen a real talking-to.