The End of Christendom: Its Demise and Rebirth

The End of Christendom: Its Demise and Rebirth

Aug 13, 2025 | Western Civilization

I was inspired to write this piece by a little book I’m re-reading by Malcolm Muggeridge. He gave a talk about the end of Christendom in 1978, the year of my new birth, for the inaugural address of the Pascal Lectures at the University of Waterloo. I just did a quick search and found the lectures continue to this day, and some are even available on YouTube. Christendom is a topic of some consternation and much ambivalence for many modern Christians. There is even a contingent who believe it was all downhill for civilization and the church when Constantine the Great converted to Christianity in the early 4th century. That’s overstating the case, but they are not fans of “Christendom.” The reason in their minds, as far as I can tell, is that Christendom confused the kingdom of God with the state and earthly power. That’s not good. Their answer is some kind of Pietistic two kingdoms Christianity, a complete “separation of church and state,” in the mystical words of 20th century secular American jurisprudence. The phrase, as most know, originated with Jefferson, but was made unquestionable doctrine in Everson v. Board of Education (1947).

Their assumption is that Christianity and the state are mutually exclusive, in Augustine’s phrasing, confusing the City of God with the earthly city of man. The spiritual life of the Christian, they believe, has nothing to do with the messy machinations of distributing power through governing. We’ll parse that out below, but there is a growing contingent of Christians of all theological stripes, I among them, who believe not only was Christendom a good thing, but that it is our God-ordained job to return the West to its Christian roots.

I became familiar with Muggeridge (1903-1990) in my early Christian journey, probably because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer who widened the scope of my vision of the Christian life to all of reality. I was born-again into a kind of fundamentalist Pietism in which I experienced Christianity as a dualism, the spiritual stuff in one sphere, and non-spiritual everywhere else. I was never overtly taught this, but it was the Christian water I swam in. When Schaeffer came along, all of a sudden thinking about how my Christina faith applied to society and civilization became extremely important to me. I’m sure when I saw the title of this little book I needed to know exactly how and why Christendom came to its end. I always wanted to see Christianity once again esteemed and influential in society, but my eschatological assumptions were not consistent with that aspiration. That was The Late Great Planet Earth 70s and 80s, and things were getting so bad Jesus was certainly coming back soon. That, however, was never God’s plan, that this fallen world would grow increasingly worse and he would rescue us from the destruction. Quite the opposite in fact.

Because of Schaeffer and my expanding Christian worldview, I was committed to seeing Christianity make a comeback in Western society, but the odds were daunting. The reason this little book fascinates me now is because in the milieu of the late 1970s and 80s, Christianity was pretty much done. We were now clearly the underdogs, even if vestiges of Christian influence hadn’t completely disappeared. Muggeridge was a keen observer of the dissolution of Christianity’s influence in Western culture. He was a one-time atheist and a successful journalist who expressed his thoughts in “stinging wit and elegant prose.” For a time in the 50s he was the editor of a British satirical magazine called Punch. As a professional observer of the human condition, like C.S. Lewis, his atheism wasn’t able to explain what he saw and experienced of life. He embraced Christianity later in life, and at the age of 79 he and his wife were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1982.

The Boomers as the Fulcrum Generation
Muggeridge’s perspective on Christianity and civilization is fascinating to me because looking back over the decades it now fits so well. At the time it was depressing. I’m more grateful than ever for the exact timing of my birth and the period of history God chose me to live in, even if I have to endure the insults of the boomer haters. In Acts Paul tells us this is no accident, for any of us:

26 From one man he made all the nations of mankind, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.

I was born in 1960 into an American culture that would soon become the maelstrom known as “the 60s.” The further I go up the mountain of age, I can look down upon the plains of my life in hindsight and see the flow of history more clearly than when I was living through it. History is like that. Nobody save God knows where it’s going or what it means when they are living through it. I’ve thought and written a lot about the flow of history and ideas and how they develop over time. It’s an endlessly fascinating topic to me. I recently wrote a piece about my supposedly benighted generation, and as I was writing I realized something I hadn’t considered before. The boomers are the fulcrum generation in Western history, a kind of pivot-point around which modern history has turned. Our boomer role in the modern world has been to experience the fulfillment and death of one world, secularism, and the transition to another. We’re not sure what that transition will bring, but in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, I argue in detail that secularism is either dead, or on its last legs, showing its age, and like the Berlin Wall circa 1989 ready to fall. The boomers were the first and last fully secular generation. How did we get there?

In 1637 a pious Catholic Christian, René Descartes, wrote a philosophical work in which striving for certainty in an increasingly skeptical age, he decided to doubt everything. He discovered the only thing he couldn’t doubt was his existence in the form of his thinking, reflected in the phase Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. I’ve mentioned this a million times, it seems, in my own writing, because it was the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment. Descartes’ perspective came to be known as rationalism, and eventually Western intellectuals thought they could figure life out and conquer reality with reason alone and without God. Revelation was no longer required. In due course secularism arose, which is the idea that a society could be run without reference to God at all. Secularism eventually dethroned Christianity in the mid-20th century in the decade into which I was born. The baby boom generation became the first in Western history to grow up with the effects of Christianity as a declining force in the culture.

When the boomers were born (1946 to 1964) most Americans thought of America as a Christian nation and the American people as a Christian people. Kennedy’s assassination on December 22, 1963, seemed to usher “the 60s.” Up to that point, America had been living in post-World War II prosperity and naivete, confident in America’s inherent greatness. No obstacle seemed too great for America to overcome. Then in a moment everything seemed to go to hell. Along with other technological and cultural changes, the invention of the pill in the early 60s allowed the boomers to become the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll generation, with a large side of protest thrown in. God only got in the way. Some hippies got religion in the 70s, but the generation as a whole became increasingly God-less. In the early 2000s, the “New Atheists” came on the scene with some very old arguments, and became a cultural phenomenon. It was the first time in history that Christianity was portrayed as not only morally suspect, but positively harmful. What we came to call woke, cultural Marxism, began to permeate the culture with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. From that point on when boomers were at the commanding heights of American government and culture, secularism was now the boss and Christianity a nuisance, or at best an irrelevance. Muggeridge was amazed at where this dissolution of Christendom was coming from:

Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elites. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values. The whole social structure is now tumbling down, dethroning its God, undermining all its certainties. All this, wonderfully enough, is being done in the name of health, wealth, and happiness of all mankind.

I wonder what Muggeridge would think looking back at this first three decades of the 21st century. I’m sure words would not be able to handle his level of incredulity. Even the dissolution of the 70s could not prepare someone for the age of woke.

Many of us were surprised at how quickly this seemed to happen, but this had been developing since 1637. Secularism at its strongest, however, was revealing its weakness. The Berlin Wall metaphor is a favorite of mine because while seeming impenetrable and eternal, we discovered it was made out of papier-mâché. It like secularism and wokeness was built on lies, and nothing built on lies can endure. At the moment of its greatest triumph during the Biden years woke, boomer excess, and government overreach, think Covid, were waking up tens of millions of Americans to The Truth.

Christendom’s Fall is the Requirement for Its Rebirth
Looking at the wreckage, Chicken Littles fail to consider a fall is often an opportunity for rebirth, enabling the realizations required for renewal and change. It’s not unlike an addict who has to hit rock bottom before he walks through the door of an AA meeting. Muggeridge saw it the same way:

For it is in the breakdown of power rather than in its triumph that men may discern its true nature and in an awareness of their own inadequacy when confronted with such a breakdown that they can best understand who and what they are. . . . So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began.

Reading his talks you might think him a pessimist—he can come off like a curmudgeon—but he assures us he is not; he sees hope coming out of the wreckage. Later in assuring us “Christ’s kingdom remains,” he affirms the necessity of the disaster for its renewal:

Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene.

In 1978 that contrast had yet to fully play itself out, and that became our opportunity for rebirth in the 21st century. It looked bad in the 1970s, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. Most Americans were too “fat and happy,” as we say, to question the dominant narratives of secular culture until the gift of Covid. I know, it certainly didn’t appear to be a gift at the time, but many now see it as a turning point of historical proportions. I’ve come to call it the neutron bomb of truth. Looking back in hindsight, I now see Covid coming after, in Jefferson’s words from the Declaration, “a long train of abuses and usurpations.”

My red pill journey started with Trump, but Covid revealed the true nature of The Matrix, and many more people woke up because of that. All of a sudden, it seemed, people started questioning everything that until then appeared “just the way things are.” For those of us who lived through decades of Christendom’s demise, there was finally hope that secularism might not be so dominant after all. As Covid wore on, and especially with “the election” of Biden, I kept hearing and reading of an awakening, and this was happening over a wide array of issues, medical, political, geopolitical, cultural, historical, and yes, spiritual, everything. I believe all of the previous issues point to the latter because underlying all of them is a search for truth, and truth has metaphysical and spiritual implications because of He who is the Truth.

I argue in my book that we are in the midst of a third Great Awakening, but one unlike the previous two. The first and second awakening happened in Christian cultures where the assumptions of the Bible and Christendom were taken for granted. Those assumptions create what in sociology is called a plausibility structure. Those are the ideas and beliefs a people take for granted as true, in the phrase I used above, as “just the way things are.” They are not questioned unless the foundations of civilization are falling apart, and it only becomes clear what those questions are, and their implications, in hindsight. We are only seeing now what in the fog of war was confusing and perplexing, but appear as necessary to get us  to the revealing point. This point, it should be unnecessary to mention, is only the very beginning of a very long journey. It requires going back, as I explain in my book, so we can find our way forward. I like what Doug Wilson calls our goal, Christendom 2.0.

What Exactly is Christendom?
That question is best answered by explaining what it is not. For that I go back to Muggeridge:

Christendom, however, is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. It bears the same relation to the everlasting truth of the Christian revelation as, say laws do to justice, or morality to goodness, or carnality to love—if you like, as Augustine’s City of God to the earthly city where we temporarily live. 

The two cities, and the relationship between them, is the confusion that causes so many Christians to embrace secularism and the myth of neutrality. When secularism developed in the 17th century as a reasonable response to the wars of religion in Europe, there arose the idea that government can be a neutral arbiter of all religious belief, and that no one religion can be priviledged in a society. It took centuries to fully develop, but by the mid-20th century pluralism became the default understanding of religion among Western cultural elites, even though such a thing doesn’t exist, in spite of all the protestations to the contrary.

The City of God, as Augustine argued, exists in the human heart, as does the earthly city. One of those two human hearts is going to determine, as Muggeridge calls it, “the administrative power structure,” and the basic assumptions by which it is run. That means these are deep and broad cultural issues, specifically which moral foundation is going to drive what the society believes. Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence in his insightful work, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

This is undeniable, but secularism is built on its denial. Every society is built on its laws, and all laws rest on assumptions of “a final source of authority.” The reason Christendom flourished for so long is because it’s assumptions rested on a Christian and biblical worldview, the only source for true societal flourishing. When the West rejected that it didn’t move to some neutral place where law and government became the umpire who just calls balls and strikes. There has to be a strike zone before the ump can call balls and strikes!

If you’re dubious about my assertion about neutrality being a myth, and you’re convinced a secular society where true religious pluralism is possible, boil the question down to the individual. Can a person live without ultimate moral values that determine right and wrong? Does not each person have to decide on what basis they make decisions about what is right and wrong? And who sets those standards? If you say the person, that means each person can set their own moral standards, and you have a recipe for societal chaos and anarchy, which sets up the inevitability of tyranny. There will be order in a society one way or the other. Secularism is basically man-made moral standards, determining right and wrong without reference to God and Scripture. As we saw clearly in the last several years, secularism leads to tyranny because there is no check on government, no higher standard to which government is accountable. For the person and the society, the question always comes down to “the final source of authority.” Christendom 1.0 got it right, if not in all the particulars. We have a chance to improve on that, going back to find the way forward.

 

 

The “Nazi” Label as a Rhetorical Kill Switch and Cultural Marxism

The “Nazi” Label as a Rhetorical Kill Switch and Cultural Marxism

Aug 6, 2025 | Culture

The first part of this title came from a post I saw on Twitter by Joel Webbon, a pastor from Texas and leader on the dissident right, or New Christian Right, or whatever one calls that these days. Sadly, he was referring to other people on the right who use this “kill switch” to try to discredit and shut down conversation about possibly uncomfortable issues. Joel’s description of this rhetorical sleight of hand comes from a friend on Twitter:

It dehumanizes. It demonizes. It’s meant to silence, to isolate, to destroy reputations, and ultimately to frighten the next man in line from ever speaking up.

And that’s the real strategy. The left used to do this, but now the neocon right has adopted it. “We’ll smear you as a Nazi, and everyone else will take the hint.”

I’ve only been active on Twitter (X for the purists) for the last year and a half, and this kind of stuff only started popping up in the last year or so. We lived through peak woke during the Biden administration. Which is why it’s disconcerting, now that Trump has started the process of cleaning our societal house, to see people on the right use the same cancel tactics the left uses to stifle dissent and limit the scope of acceptable discourse. One phrase, for example, that annoys me because it is doing exactly this is “ethno-nationalism.” There are some who argue that an ethnic monoculture, i.e., not “diverse,” is better for societal flourishing than a cultural United Nations. I’ve read and listened to their arguments and find them plausibly persuasive, but when others call them “ethno-nationalists,” the implication is . . . Nazi! White supremecist isn’t far behind. They, it is implied, should be shunned. Uh, no they shouldn’t. Sure, some on the outer edges, the fringe, should be identified as lines must always and will be drawn in any society, but the Nazi line is weak and almost never justified.

I responded in a comment that it’s a shame most people have no idea where the rhetorical effectiveness of this “kill switch” came from, but I will tell you. It’s a tactic the left has used since shortly after World War II (and even some prior), and yet another of the woeful consequences of what Pat Buchanan called an “Unnecessary War.” (If that triggers you, I would suggest you read Buchanan’s book, Churchill, Hitler, and /The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Agree or not, his case is not a frivolous one.) Let’s see how we got here.

The Post-World War II Consensus
Seeing fascism as a phenomenon of the right is part of what some of us see as the toxic stew of the “post-World War II consensus.” I’ll get to that below, but we need to address this so-called consensus first. Worldwide tyranny and totalitarianism were the great fear coming out of the war, and the Western nations were united in their commitment to not allow its worldwide expansion. The Soviet Union, a product of the first Great War, which gave us the second, ended up dominating much of the world anyway because of Allied incompetence or treachery, take your pick. The Cold War was the result. Godless communism was the great enemy of the time, and there was a consensus for transnational cooperation to keep it at bay. Only Ronald Reagan thought Soviet Communism could be defeated, and it was. Another area of consensus is that fascism in the form of Nazism was the apotheosis of evil in the modern world, the apex of the apex, top of the mountain, never matched in the history of the world, and to be avoided at all costs. In this consensus it is assumed fascism is a phenomenon coming from the cultural and political right, and few question that. All agree, though, it must not be allowed to fester, thus the “rhetorical kill switch.”

Liberal democracy is also an unquestioned good in this consensus, and this is true on the left and right. I realized I was a conservative in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and I had no idea the conservative movement was a liberal movement. None, and for decades. I knew there was “something rotten in Denmark” for a long time, but I couldn’t identify it. All conservatives did was lose. At best, conservatism was committed to slowing down the gains of the progressive liberalism of Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, but reversing it didn’t seem to be part of the plan. Oh sure, they talked a good game, but when push came to shove, they didn’t do anything. I had learned about William F. Buckley and National Review magazine back at the beginning of my conservative journey, and he was a hero of mine for 35 years, then he wasn’t. In the very first issue of the magazine in 1955 he wrote of the mission of the magazine and by extension the fledgling conservative movement, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” At best conservatives became those who pleaded, “Please slow down a little.”

I struggled wondering in my disillusionment exactly what I was politically  if I wasn’t a conservative. Maybe a libertarian? I quickly realized that was basically evil; choice as the ultimate good is a stupid moral standard—one that leads to destruction. Thankfully, a New York billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star came down an escalator on June 16, 2015, to save me from myself. It just took a while to realize God had put my political salvation in the most unlikely package. Over the Trump years I’ve come to realize the conservative movement is basically filled with liberals in skirts, just another form of modern liberalism, classical liberalism some call it, but one that believes in tradition. Most conservatives buy into the secular political and cultural order just as much as liberals and most are not all that different than liberals. They all believe in the secular myth of neutrality, that pluralism is a positive good, and that no one religion should be privileged in government or the public square, including Christianity. The phrase Christian Nationalism is anathema to them, and a Christian nation an oxymoron. One of my favorite conservatives in the world actually said that, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, and I challenged that in a post last year. And they all believe fascism comes from the right.

I have discovered through my MAGA journey what I am politically, thanks in large part to Steve Bannon. I would now call myself a Christian populist-nationalist conservative who is deeply suspicious of the post-World War II consensuses. This also includes the accepted narratives of 20th century wars. I would again highly suggest Buchanan’s Unnecessary War, and at least you’ll know there are valid questions about the narratives, agree or disagree.

Because of Trump I began to question many things, and because of Covid came to question everything. I am determined not to turn into a cynic, which I believe is sinful, but to have a healthy skepticism about everything. Writing my last book I learned about the true origins of “the Nazi kill switch,” and it puts into perspective experiences those of us on the right are all too familiar with.

Adorno, Marcuse, Anti-Fascism, and Repressive Tolerance
We have cultural Marxism to thank for “the Nazi kill switch.” It goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s which migrated to America prior to the war. The Marxist intellectuals in this movement realized traditional or “orthodox” communism based on class oppression wasn’t working, so a change in tactics was required. The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that “orthodox” Marxism didn’t bring the fruit of revolution Marx promised, but that the revolutionary consciousness required would clearly not arise spontaneously; it must be assiduously cultivated via culture. They recognized Western societies produced cultures almost completely resistant to revolution. Marxist revolutionary consciousness had to find its way into the worldview of the average prosperous Westerner, and that could only happen through the transformation of the culture. Thus in due course arose the strategy of the “long march through the institutions.”

One of the cultural Marxists, Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), had developed the concept of “cultural Hegemony,” meaning the dominance of one group over another through cultural norms. This dominant position of a particular set of ideas leads to them becoming commonsensical and intuitive, especially traditional religion, and cultural Marxists were determined to take it all down, replacing specifically Christian and capitalist ideas with Marxism. Marxist revolutionary consciousness would then “naturally” develop, or what we know today as woke. The effectiveness of this strategy is remarkable, and through it we have “cancel culture,” only certain accepted speech can be tolerated. This mentality has been endemic to the left, but it took a while for the “long march” to make it widely acceptable in Western culture. We largely have Adorno and Marcuse to thank for that.

The rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and fascism thanks to Mussolini, was the narrative in which woke incubated. The Nazi rhetorical kill switch was already being used prior World War II as interventionists were trying to get America into the war. Since Hitler and Nazism were ultimate evil and soon to take over the world, those not sufficiently bellicose were called Nazi sympathizers. It wasn’t widespread because the vast majority of Americans had no interest in getting into another European war, but Roosevelt and his administration sure were. The war and the Holocaust seemed to prove the ultimate nature of Nazism’s evil, but that’s only because the allies and the left played down the wickedness of Stalin and communist atrocities. In a contest between totalitarian tyrant baddies, I’d vote for Stalin to get the grand prize, with Hitler getting the runner up. And one last World War II point. Hitler, despite claims to the contrary, never had designs on worldwide conquest, while Stalin sure did; it’s baked into the communist cake. The Cold War proved it. But nobody today, left or right, uses “Commie” as a “rhetorical kill switch” to stifle debate and discussion. Let’s see why.

Theodor Adorno (1903–69) – Adorno published a book in 1950 with the loaded title, The Authoritarian Personality. The default position ever since is that fascism is a phenomenon of the right, and communism of the left, a convenient distortion for our
cultural elites. Dinesh D’Souza in his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left has a section titled, “The Deceitful Origin of ‘Anti-Fascism.’” He writes that after World War II, “Nazism became the very measure of evil. So Marcuse and Adorno knew that anything associated with Nazism or fascism would automatically be tainted. They set about putting this obvious fact to political use on behalf of the political Left.” Fascism in this distortion of reality would now be associated with capitalism and moral traditionalism, which a la Marx must be “abolished.”

D’Souza argues persuasively that Marxism and fascism are ideologies of the left, but because of Adorno they came to be associated with two different ends of the ideological and political spectrum. This has some plausibility because Hitler hated communism, but that doesn’t make National Socialism any less an  ideology of the left. In his book Adorno introduced the F(ascism)-Scale as D’Souza explains:

The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression. Fascism develops early and we can locate it in young people’s attachments to religious superstition and conventual middle-class values about family, sex, and society.

So a la Marx, religion and the family must be “abolished.” The book and ideas were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by an already liberal academia and media, becoming the accepted perspective that fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It’s a complete lie, but that’s what Marxists do. Sadly, the right largely accepted this taxonomy, as if Nazism and communism were on opposite sides of a continuum of political totalitarianism. We should reject this, let alone use it to verbally tar and feather those on our side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum.

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) – After the war Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno went back to Germany but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Marcuse was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940 and served as an intelligence analyst for the precursor of the CIA from 1941 to 1944. After the war, he continued in that work for another agency, and then made his way back into academia. He taught at Columbia and Harvard universities (1951 to 1954), Brandeis University (1954–65), and the University of California, San Diego (1965–76), where after retirement he was honorary emeritus professor of philosophy until his death.

He is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The “Old Left” were those who embraced the old orthodox forms of Marxism, and especially that as practiced in the Soviet Union. Young Marxist radicals, by contrast, were disaffected with Soviet Communism and looking for new ways to bring down the capitalist West; the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. During his time in academia, he attracted young radical disciples like Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman among many others.

Marcuse, a prolific author, wrote Repressive Tolerance in 1965. That counter intuitive title comes from his argument that tolerance is “repressive” when it tolerates ideas from the right. Written as part of a book called A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse argues that “tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving as a cause of oppression.” From the perspective of a cultural Marxist, of course it is. The perverse Marxist logic of Marcuse has to be read to be believed. In this upside down, inside out world, tolerance “actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Free speech and the First Amendment are considered dangerous; a common trope on the left is “speech is violence.” If that is true, of course it must not be tolerated, and we’ll see why from Marcuse’s perspective.

Adorno allowed Marcuse to develop “the Nazi argument.” It was a diabolically genius move paying cultural dividends to this day. First Marcuse lays his cards on the table:

Liberating tolerance . . . would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the left.

Then he gives us the punch line:

In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.

It’s a short trip from this to “speech is violence,” and by definition it can only be speech from the right. This led to a common phrase the New Left used in their protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, “No free speech for Fascists.” Thus what we know as cancel culture is a necessity to keep the right from doing what Fascists and Nazi’s always do. Not cancelling people on the right and their speech would be a dereliction of duty, the First Amendment be damned. Of course, all the political violence is on the left, but that is justified violence because it’s used against the Fascist right. A group using violence today can be called Antifa, for anti-fascists, with a straight face. You can’t make this stuff up!

Now That We Know?
Since we now know where the “Nazi rhetorical kill switch” came from, can we use it in good conscience? Do threats from potential fascists and Nazi’s actually exist? Is the “dissident right” full of “angry young men” who are susceptible to the “the authoritarian personality”? While I conceded there are some angry young men who are rightly frustrated at the dominant globalist establishment manifested in the post-World War II consensus, is it valid to “cancel” them? To discredit them in a way that seeks to silence them? To ignore their concerns? Or discredit their arguments without at least understanding them? It seems to me the questions answer themselves.

When I see, for example, this tactic being use on, of all people, Stephen Wolfe, who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, I call garbage. I am deeply uncomfortable with the antisemitism among some of this crowd, but I’ve tried to engage with them and understand where they are coming from, while rejecting their fundamental premise that Jews are “the problem.” Outside of that, I have no problem with this slice of the conservative Christian right questioning the “consensus”, the accepted narrative of political and cultural reality since the end of the war. I myself once accepted the dominant narratives of everything from the Civil War on, then Trump. Covid then destroyed the credibility of all the supposed “experts,” and created millions of skeptics who were otherwise not inclined to question things. Even the Lord of Glory says, “Come now, let us reason together,” (Is. 1:18), so let us discuss things without assuming the worst motives of our interlocutors, and everyone will benefit as we continue bringing God’s kingdom on earth as Christ taught us to pray.

 

 

The Primary Importance of the Ascension: Why Do Evangelicals Ignore It?

The Primary Importance of the Ascension: Why Do Evangelicals Ignore It?

Jul 30, 2025 | The Gospel

That’s a good question. I was reminded of it when I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for my father-in-law’s 90th birthday. He goes to a Lutheran church, and we decided to go with him that Sunday. It so happened that was Ascension Sunday, June 1. What is Ascension Sunday, you ask? You are likely an Evangelical if you ask that question. The reason is that as Evangelicals we seem to all but ignore the ascension of Jesus Christ to the right hand of God. I didn’t realize how blind most of us were to one of the most important events of redemptive history until one day on a walk I heard someone say on my little trusty MP3 player, “Evangelicals basically ignore the ascension.” I remember stopping the player and thinking, “He’s right!” I wondered why we do that, and I had no ready answer, only that having been a churchgoer for over 40 years by that point, I don’t ever remember a sermon on the ascension. If there was one, it wasn’t memorable. I aimed to rectify that in my life.

Christ ascending to heaven is revealed to us in Act 1, which might give us a clue as to its importance. Before the church could be established and grow to advance God’s kingdom on earth, King Jesus needed to be enthroned at the right hand of the Almighty where he reigns to make that happen through his church. The ascension was his coronation. If you saw King Charles’ coronation on May 6, 2023, multiply that by infinity and you’ll have some sense of the momentousness of that day. Yet we all but ignore it. First, let’s look at that passage in Acts:

6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

That’s it. What did it mean? What did those who witnessed it think it meant? Where did Jesus go? And why? We use the word ascension to describe it, which simply means to go up. We’ll take a look at what it means and why we shouldn’t ignore it like we have.

Biblical Clues to What the Ascension Means
There are many, but two passages stand out. One is from the Old Testament in Daniel 7. Written over 500 years before the ascension, the Prophet is given a dream of four beasts, and one of the angels told him the meaning of his dream:

17 ‘The four great beasts are four kings that will rise from the earth. 18 But the holy people of the Most High will receive the kingdom and will possess it forever—yes, for ever and ever.’

The last beast is the most terrifying and terrible, and we know that represents the Roman Empire, the greatest most fearful empire the world had ever known. It’s during that empire when God’s people will receive this forever kingdom, and we’re told in this chapter how that will happen. The Ancient of Days takes his seat on His thrown, the court is seated, and Daniel says, “the books were open.” Judgment upon the nations is about to begin, and then we’re given a picture of the Ascension:

13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

Given my eschatological assumptions for most of my Christian life, I assumed this referred to Christ’s second coming when all things would be consummated in him. But we need to note carefully what happened at this coming. This son of man was specifically given “authority, glory and sovereign power.” I assumed that the “all” referring to nations and peoples meant each and every single human being, and clearly there are quite a few people in the world who currently do not worship Jesus. But we do see that people in all nations from among all peoples do worship him, which prior to Christ, the gospel, and the Holy Spirit coming could not have happened. But what clinches this understanding of the passage is Paul’s description of Christ’s ascension in Ephesians 1. Speaking of God’s “incomparably great power for us who believe,” Paul says:

That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

We see that Christ’s resurrection is directly connected to his being seated at God’s right hand and receiving the authority and power Daniel saw being given the son of man in his dream. These two passages are describing the same event, and this happened at Christ’s first coming. The implications of this are profound and all encompassing.

For most of my Christian life, specifically from the fall of 1978 until August of 2022 when I embraced postmillennialism in one day, I believed Christ’s rule and authority was primarily over the church and Christians. Most of the world was a Wild, Wild West where outlaws ruled because the fallen world belonged to the devil. As a Calvinist who strongly believes in God’s sovereign reign over all things, I knew God’s rule over all things was absolute, but thought the devil had some legitimate authority over everything outside of the church. The Ephesians passage can seem to say that because Christ is given that authority and power “for the church,” but that doesn’t mean it’s only inside the church, or inside the heart of Christians, and the devil gets to have his way everywhere else. I would have said at the time that God allows this to happen, as I still believe he does, but now I know the world no longer belongs to the devil.

This dynamic completely changed when Jesus was confronted by the devil in the desert with three temptations, the third of which was the turning point in redemptive history:

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Prior to Christ accomplishing his mission, the devil owned “all the kingdoms of the world.” They were his to dispose of as he pleased. God promised, however, that the woman’s seed would strike the serpent’s head, and his defeat was fully realized at Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God. The world now belongs to Christ! I’m not even sure how this is debatable, but people read a few verses, use their sight, not faith, see how horrible the world can be, and conclude the devil is “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Greek often translated world is not cosmos, but aión or age. So Paul’s reference isn’t to the earth or God’s created order, but to the fallen world, the age when he reigned on earth. Now the devil is only the god of lost sinners, and God’s kingdom and Christ’s reign have been slowly taking over territory for the last two thousand years. That’s what the ascension means, the extension of Christ’s reign on earth. This is why Jesus’ reference to the gates of hell in Matthew 16 tells us the devil and his minions are on the defensive, and the church on the offensive. Gates in the ancient world were meant to keep invaders out, and Christians are the invaders in this fallen world. The devil doesn’t stand a chance.

Christus Victor and Christ’s Reign
Prior to the reformation, the concept of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, Christ suffering the punishment for humanity’s sins, and satisfying God’s wrath, was not a central doctrine of the church. From the Apostle Paul on it was always there in varying degrees, but not in the way it would become as a legal theological formulation in and after the Reformation. Two other models of the atonement were prominent prior, moral formation, Christ’s death as example, and Christus Victor, or Christ’s victory over sin, death, and the devil. With the three together we get a fuller picture of what Christ accomplished in his mission to earth. Christus Victor, however, got a bit lost in the Reformation shuffle, coming back into prominence with the publication of a book in 1931 by Swedish Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulén called, you guessed it, Christus Victor. Reviewing the three main ideas of the atonement, he argued that the idea of a divine act of liberation was its primary meaning. As a good Protestant in the Reformed tradition I would disagree with him, but divine liberation is a significant consequence of the atonement. The primary passage used to justify this is Colossians 2:15:

13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled the record of debt which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The record of debt literally means a written legal document, and this was cancelled by Christ’s death, our sins washed away, but Aulén focused on verse 15 and Christ’s victory over these “powers and authorities.” Another passage is from Hebrews 2:

14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Christ’s death and resurrection broke the power the devil had over God’s people. Another verse is in I John 3:

8 The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

Christus Victor is directly tied to the ascension because Christ is at the right hand of God. The big argument in modern Christianity is the extent and scope of Christ’s disarming and destroying of the devil’s work. I use the word modern because prior to the 19th century, Christians believed all of reality, every square inch of it, and every person and thing in it, was the domain of Christ’s rule. Evil was only allowed because it advanced God’s kingdom in some way.

The giving of the devil so much perceived power only developed in the church in Ireland with the Plymouth Brethren and J.N. Darby in the 1830s. They came up with a novel idea called at the time the new premillennialism, which in the 1920s started to be called dispensationalism because of the influence of C.I. Scofield’s Reference Bible which was published in 1909. The idea of various “dispensations” in which God dealt with His people differently in different ages or dispensations became popular because of Scofield’s Bible. In this version of Christianity, the devil had the upper hand down here in this fallen world, and things would inevitably get continually worse until Jesus came back to save the day. The goal of Christianity was to save as many sinners as possible because the ship was sinking fast. It’s an interesting quirk of history that dispensationalism and revivalism developed around the same time in the middle of the 19th century. Darby, in fact, came over to America in the 1860s and hung out with evangelist D.L. Moody. The messages were a perfect fit. In this take, Satan was on the offensive and the church was playing defense. This perspective is in fact so deeply rooted in the modern church that for over four decades I wasn’t aware that the gates of hell meant the devil was on the defensive! It took my unlikely conversion to postmillennialism for me to discover that.

Up until Darby and the last two hundred years, Christians understood it was Christ who was the ascended king over all of reality, and because of that Satan didn’t have a chance no matter what it might have looked like at the moment. Christians used to be long-term thinkers, builders of cathedrals they knew they wouldn’t worship in. While the expected immanent return of Jesus wasn’t unknown in church history, the dominant theme was that even though individual lives were extremely short, God was advancing his kingdom over the long course of history. Christians believed they were playing some small part in that cosmic drama. The goal was never to escape, but living faithfully in an uncertain world worshiping a certain God.

The Binding of the Strong Man
Almost all Christians believe Satan is a defeated foe, but they also believe his ultimate defeat has to wait until the end of time. Until then he’s pretty much given carte blanche on earth to wreak all kinds of havoc. But that isn’t quite the biblical take. When something especially heinous happened, a friend told me the world belongs to the devil, and I replied, “But he’s a puppet on a string.” Why God allows the devil any latitude at all, I have no idea, other than it’s for his glory and our ultimate good. Romans 8:28 says you can take that to the biblical bank. We know Satan is a puppet on a string, and to mix metaphors, on a very short leash because Jesus taught us so in his ministry of exorcism. Nothing like the extent of it had ever happened in Israel’s history. Jesus was bringing the kingdom of God into enemy territory; his eschatological mission was set into motion and would reach its final fulfillment in his ascension. He began taking back territory at Pentecost.

Which brings us to this parable of the binding of the strong man. We read the story in Matthew 12. Jesus had healed a demon-possessed man, and the people are astonished thinking he could be the Messiah, the Son of David. But the Pharisees don’t like it one bit, and are likely jealous. They accuse Jesus of driving out demons by the prince of demons. How in the world does that work? Jesus, being the creator of logic, obviously needed to teach them a lesson. He tells them a kingdom divided against itself will not endure. That’s politics 101. Then he gives them and us the punch line:

28 But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. 29 Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.

The kingdom of God broke into the devil’s world at Christ’s first coming, and Jesus in binding the strong man, i.e., Satan, has opened up the entire fallen world to the advance of the kingdom. The spiritual dynamic of reality between BC and AD had completely changed. Revelation 20 gives us a fuller picture of what happened when Jesus bound the strong man:

Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

Since dispensationalism came on the scene, many Christian interpret the thousand years literally, but given the symbolic nature of Revelation, we can be confident John meant the long period of time between Christ’s first and second coming. Prior to Satan being bound and thrown into the pit, God’s revelation was limited to Israel, a small point of light in a dark world. God had given the Hebrews the mission to be a blessing to the Gentiles, and they could barely be a blessing to themselves. The futility endured for 1,500 years because the devil did have full carte blanche over the entire world. Adam had given up ownership of it when he rebelled against God. After Christ accomplished his mission, that little point of light has permeated to the four corners of the earth!

Our confidence is not in us, nor our efforts, but in “one like a Son of Man,” sitting at God’s right hand with “all authority in heaven and on earth” to enable his church to fulfill its mission to disciple the nations. The ascension gives us the confidence and optimism that not only just some people within all nations will be saved, as many Christians believe, but that entire nations will embrace Christ. They will be able to experience true human flourishing because blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does America Have a Judeo-Christian Heritage?

Does America Have a Judeo-Christian Heritage?

Jul 23, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

Since I started getting active on Twitter in early 2024, I’ve come across many on the New Christian Right, or whatever we might be called, who are not fans of the phrase Judeo-Christian, to say the least. It upsets them because it seems to make Christianity a part of Judaism, or confuses Christianity with Judaism, or misses the point that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. I’m not exactly sure, but these are my best guesses. They are, also to say the least, not fans of modern Israel, or the dispensationalism that believes Isreal is still part of God’s redemptive plan. Their animus toward the phrase never sat well with me, and I tended to see it as making something out of nothing. Then I saw this short post from Joel Webbon on Twitter:

Judeo-Christianity is a pernicious false religion.

And this was my response:

Joel, technically it’s not a religion at all, and nobody is claiming it is. People who use it don’t use it as a noun as you do, but as an adjective.

The phrase reflects an ethos, a tradition born of Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. It’s fine far as it goes, except many people using it assume the myth of neutrality is true, and do not believe a nation should be Christian. That’s what we should focus on, not that Judea-Christian is a religion.

Joel’s statement made me realize the heart of their problem with the phrase was thinking it’s affirming a mixed religion that is not Christianity. I believe dispensationalism has contributed to this because dispensationalists really do believe modern Judaism and the nation-state of Israel are in effect part of the Christian religion and its ultimate eschatological fulfillment. In fact, what’s going on in Israel now is, according to the dispensationalists, part of God’s fulfilling his Old Testament covenant promises to Israel. This is why they will tell us to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” and why they seem to have unqualified support for the nation of Israel. It’s almost as if Israel can do no wrong, whereas people like Joel seem to believe Israel can do no right. I’m in the unenvious position of being somewhere in between these positions.

I was wondering when the term “Judeo-Christian” was first used, and so of course asked Grok:

The term “Judeo-Christian” was first used in the early 19th century. Its earliest known appearance is in an 1821 letter by English writer Joseph Wolff, referring to a “Judeo-Christian” community in the context of religious conversion. The term gained broader usage in the 20th century, particularly in the United States, to describe shared ethical and cultural values between Judaism and Christianity.

That goes back much further than I would have guessed. I suspected it wouldn’t have been used until Israel became a nation in 1948, and the dispensationalists were saying, “See, we told you so!” But there is no doubt since Israel became a nation, and then a stable ally in the Middle East, that phrase became common among conservatives and Christians. I have no problem with it, and I don’t think any Christian should, mainly because it’s an accurate description, as I said to Joel, of the ethos or traditions America inherited at its founding.

Was the Jewish Religion Significant in America’s Founding?
The simple answer is yes, but of course through the lens of a thoroughly Protestant, dominant Calvinistic, culture. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s was a powerful influence on the social and political life of Americans for it drove the implications of Christianity deep into the American consciousness. Given this move of God’s Spirit was antiauthoritarian and democratic, the Crown would not have been happy about it. Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation, agrees, saying “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution.

I have a book on my shelf called Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, and it clocks in at just shy of 1600 pages. As I’ve dipped into it over the last ten or so years, many of the sermons are based on Old Testament texts. Christians themselves saw Judaism as integral to building a Christian nation, but of course in a Christian context of fulfillment. We also know that the founders quoted from the Bible more than any other book or thinker, modern or ancient, and Deuteronomy was the book they quoted from most. They also didn’t see Jewish religious practice in any way inimical or contradictory to the spirit of America’s experiment in Republican government. The issue, it appears to me, comes down to religious liberty, and if that concept is consistent with the idea of a Christian nation. America’s founders apparently didn’t think so. Before we explore religious liberty in more detail, let’s look at how George Washington, our first president and arguably the man who made America possible, saw that liberty in practice.

Washington visited Rhode Island in 1790 to acknowledge the state’s recent ratification of the Constitution and to promote passage of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  When he visited Newport he met a delegation of citizens who read him messages of welcome. One of those citizens was Moses Seixas, the warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport. Remarkably, Seixas in his welcome would use words Washington quoted verbatim in a letter back to the congregation. Seixas gave thanks to “the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of men” that the Jews, previously “deprived … of the invaluable rights of free Citizens” on account of their religion, now lived under a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Speaking of all American citizens possessing alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, Washington writes:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

For Washington and the founders, one of our “inherent natural rights” as Americans was to worship as we please, which could not be considered mere toleration. Freedom of conscience was an inviolable right of all Americans of whatever religious persuasion. I’m sure they would have some ambivalence at the breadth of cultural and religious diversity in America today, but it’s reasonable to believe the same attitude Washington had to the Jewish worshipers in his day would apply to others in ours.

Are Christian Nationalism and Religious Liberty Compatible? The Secular Myth of Neutrality
The answer to that question very much depends on what you mean by religious liberty, which for Christians is not as easy a question to answer as you might think—unless you’re a secularist. Unfortunately most Christians are indeed secular. In fact, most Christians and conservatives are liberals, who believe in a kind of pluralism based on the secular myth of neutrality.

According to this myth, there is no preferred religion because secularism welcomes all religions equally. The public square is a place where God is unwelcome, persona non grata. Christianity gets a seat at the table just like any other religion, be it Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or atheism, but no religion, including Christianity, gets privileged status. I’ll briefly address this below, but I’ve dismantled this myth here previously, many times actually, but the concept of religious liberty today is a thoroughly secular concept that wasn’t fully accepted in America until the glorious 1960s. That’s when the post-World War II consensus of neutrality took over and the privileged status of Christianity was, well neutered. It would be some years before Christianity was treated as a threat to all that is good and decent and right, but in the Biden years that’s exactly where we were, in law and culture. Then Trump 2.0. Mind you, secularism and the myth is still alive and well, but Christianity is no longer the whipping boy it was when woke was king.

The question in a nation with a Christian self-conception is how much latitude in religious practice we allow. Complete carte blanche, do whatever you want? Should Satan worship be allowed? Animal sacrifice? Drug induced “worship”? Only the most radical secularist libertarian would argue that no lines should be drawn; the question is what and where. You’ll notice I said a nation with a “Christian self- conception.” Up until those 1960s most Americans would have said yes, we are a Christian nation. They wouldn’t have obsessed with details, or panicked over, God forbid, a possible theocracy. Every nation in the West prior that time had a Christian self-conception. Just watch the coronation of King Charles in May of 2023, and see how steeped England still is at some level in its own Christian self-conception. At every other level, it is radically secular. All the assumptions that run every aspect of societies in the West are secular. This is slowly changing as nationalist-populist movements with Christian awareness are growing throughout the West, not least in the unashamed Christianity the permeates the Trump administration. That would not have been on my bingo card!

I won’t solve the question of religious liberty in America in such a short space, but it’s something Christians need to discuss and debate and maybe even come to some agreement on as, God willing, Christianity again becomes dominant in America. Getting rid of secularism in the church would be a good start, in fact an essential start. If we can’t convince our brothers and sisters in Christ that neutrality is a myth, then a Christian America is a pipe dream. I know, most see this as the longest of long shots, but I don’t. Secularism is dead, as I argue in detail in my latest book, Going Back to Find the way Forward, and something needs to fill that societal vacuum it leaves as it whimpers away in its exposed futility.

I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It appeared so strong and impenetrable, so enduring. Almost everyone except a very few, including Ronald Reagan, thought the Berlin Wall wouldn’t be going anywhere in our lifetimes. In fact, when Ronnie told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin in June 1987, I thought, now you’ve really lost it, Ronnie! That ain’t happening. Two and a half years later it did. The reason is that its strength was an illusion. An empire built on lies cannot endure, and secularism is a lie, every bit as much as East Germany was. Why is it a lie? Because it assumes societal neutrality is possible; it is not. Let my quote some thinkers who make the point. R.J. Rushdoony in his book Politics of Guilt & Pity says of the impossibility of neutrality as an undisputable fact:

Modern thinkers to the contrary, law is a product of metaphysics, a cultural expression of a basically religious fact. The contemporary avoidance of metaphysics is by no means its elimination. Men do not dispense with metaphysics merely because they refuse to discuss it.

Metaphysics is a word coined by Aristotle. He wrote a work about the physical world called Physics, which is basically his observations of the physical world. He then wrote a book called The Metaphysics, which is “beyond” or “after” physics, his study into the underlying nature of things. He calls this “first philosophy,” a study of being, of the fundamental principles and causes of all things. In other words, it’s the opposite of secular because God and spiritual things are metaphysical, and law inevitably flows from how we see ultimate reality. In the secular world, our Creator is the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection by random mutation, or chance. Man makes his own rules, his own laws, there is no meta-physics. Those are modern man’s fundamental assumptions. Yes, as Rushdoony says, they cannot be escaped:

Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book That Made Your World, states an unalterable fact of existence:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

This includes its laws. We can have either a secular nation (or Islamic or Hindu, etc.), or a Christian nation. Whatever that “final source of authority” will determine the nature of that society and it’s culture. In a secular society it is man, the ultimate fulfillment of which is the state, which means there is no recourse beyond the state, and thus tyranny is inevitable.

Liberty of Conscience and Religious Liberty
We can’t discuss religious liberty without considering liberty of conscience, and those two should never be confused. Even in ancient Israel, the theocracy all modern people seem to fear, foreigners were mostly part of the moral and ceremonial lives of the Hebrews, but they were never forced to believe anything. Yet I often hear people claim that a Christian America would be a theocracy like ancient Israel, and people would be forced to believe in Christianity. No they wouldn’t because God never forces people to believe anything, and neither should we. In fact, if you look at Jesus in the gospels, he goes out of his way to get people not to believe in him! He was not interested in making Christianity easy, and often went out of his way to make it hard. But Jesus was not interested in establishing a government but in saving the world. He left the government stuff to his followers once he left the scene for good, and gave us the deposit of his presence in the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The idea of a liberty of conscience in Western culture, and in fact the entire world, comes from Martin Luther’s confrontation with the establishment of his day. He declared that his conscience was captive to the Word of God, and that “it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” Those who were insisting he recant, or else, could care less about his conscience. They had societies to run and couldn’t allow every person to willy nilly believe whatever they wanted. Who knows what kind of societal chaos would follow if that were allowed. Luther was a dangerous precedent, and he had to be stopped. Gutenberg’s Press made that a futile endeavor, but we come to the wrong conclusion if we think liberty of conscience and religious liberty are synonymous. The former is absolute because God has not given us the right nor the power to coerce human thought. The totalitarians of the 20th century learned that the hard way, speaking of the Berlin Wall. Having said that we come back to lines.

Most Christians and conservatives have been completely indoctrinated into the secular zeitgeist. This spirit of the times in which we’ve lived for the last hundred years tells us America has always been a secular nation. In fact, even Christian historians like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden claim America’s Founders were primarily Deists and Unitarians and “not in any traditional sense Christian.” That quote comes from their book, The Search for Christian America, and one gets the impression they did not find it. In fact, America was in every sense a Christian Nation, even if it was not overtly enough for some of us.

I go back to the phrase I used above, a Christian self-conception. For most of our history, everything about the beliefs and worldview of almost all Americans was Christian. Christian morality, God’s law, the Bible, all were relevant to daily life and the life of government. As is often pointed out, nine of the thirteen colonies had established churches, and they had a religious test for public office. If a man didn’t affirm certain Christian doctrines, he wasn’t allowed to run for office. Nobody saw that as anti-American, or a violation of our modern secular dogma of the “separation of church and state.” Nobody. That isn’t to say we should do the same thing today, only that Christianity was never seen as inimical to the liberty established at America’s founding. In fact, contrary to what most everyone believes today except we “Christian nationalists,” is that Christianity is the foundation and requirement for true religious liberty. Secularism always and everywhere will lead to tyranny and totalitarianism.

Having said this, we must realize that every government and society draws “religious” lines. A “Judeo-Christian” society will not draw the same lines as a Christian society, but lines will be drawn. They always are and always will be. I’ll say it again: Neutrality doesn’t exist. Everything allowed or promoted affirms a worldview, and dismisses others. It’s just the nature of things. Since most of us like America and living in a representative republic, that means we at some level have to convince our fellow citizens about what those lines need to be. We can pass laws that are unpopular, but those will not be enforced unless the people embrace them. The current illegal immigration crisis is a good example. The vast majority of Americans hate it no matter how much leftists and Democrats lie about it. Ultimately, the American people have to be on board or things don’t happen.

The mission, should we choose to accept it, is to first convince our Christian brothers and sisters that the secular nation driven myth of neutrality is a Satanic lie. The American people won’t be convinced until the church is. The myth sounds good on paper, but it always leads to tyrannical results. While a result of hundreds of years of cultural change, the myth of neutrality is primarily a product of what’s come to be called the “Post World War II Consensus.” Thankfully, this consensus is falling apart as populist nationalism and the Great Awakening are moving around the world. Making America Christian Again will allow us to one day escape secularism and practice true religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

 

 

 

 

The Christian Nation and the Westphalian Nation-State

The Christian Nation and the Westphalian Nation-State

Jul 16, 2025 | Politics & Government

If you want to create some consternation among some “right thinking” people just use the phrase Christian nationalism, or God forbid, say you are a Christian nationalist. You’ll be branded as either a white supremacist by leftists, or a Theonomist by conservatives. Unfortunately, most Christians and conservatives believe a secular nation and pluralism are the only way conflicting religious perspectives can live peacefully together. We’ll discuss this myth of neutrality below, but I’ve even heard a Christian nation described as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Jesus begs to differ.

The nation-state is one of many gifts of Christianity to the world. The idea of a nation with identifiable sovereign borders is a relatively new phenomena in the history of the world. Prior to the 17th century, borders were determined by military power, and as power dynamics shifted among peoples, so did borders. This began to change in the 17th century as the result of a European peace treaty, the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ and Eighty Years’ Wars.

So taken for granted by most people, the nation-state is assumed to be the natural order of things—it is not. The reason? Babel. Because of sinful human nature, Babel teaches us that hubris will always tend to make people consolidate power to unbiblical tyrannical ends unless they are countered with forces that limit their power, something America’s Founders understood better than any thinkers the world has ever known.

Because the nation-state is un-natural, it is fragile, and in our day is uniquely under assault by transnationalist globalist elites who see borders as inhibiting their Babel-like agenda. Put simply, nationalism is an obstacle to the goals of the globalist technocratic elite, the builders of a modern globalist babel. Given this natural sinful tendency to centralize and absolutize power, Christians are obligated to be nationalists and need to recognize the Satanic threat of globalism.

The Characteristics of a Nation
A nation is more than borders. It is first a local experience because loyalty and commitment comes from the bottom up: first the family, then the locality, town, or city, then the county, the state, and finally the nation. There is no further Christian obligation beyond that. The organic nature of the nation is described well by Stephen Wolfe in his book, The Case for Christian Nationalism:

[T]he nation, properly understood, is a particular people with ties of affection that bind them to each other and their place of dwelling; and thus nationalism is the nation acting for its national good, which includes conversation of those ties of affection.

Affection is the operative word. We can’t have a real personal devotion and loyalty to an abstraction like a United Nations or European Union. Affection is only possible with what we know in some measure personally, intimately. This sense of peoplehood, if you will, is inevitable and necessary in a world full of nations. Yoram Hazony further defines nation in his book, Conservatism, A Rediscovery.

A number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies—characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors.

Obliterating these God-created connections and distinctions is ultimately impossible. Globalists either ignore or denigrate such attachments because they stand in their way of global Utopia.

The push back against this drive to globalize the world began to manifest itself with Brexit, the movement in the UK to pull out of the European Union. The election to confirm England’s exit from the EU was on June 23, 2016, but the debate had been going on for a while. Open borders, a globalist necessity, and mass immigration from non-European countries, much of it illegal, was a driver of Brexit and other nationalist movements throughout Europe. The two sides were predictable and were the precursor to the same dynamic leading to the very unlikely election of President Trump later that year.

The Necessity of a Christian Nation
If you’re a Christian and you believe in nations (i.e., you’re not a globalist), I contend you should be a Christian nationalist. The concept of the nation, or specific people groups, is an important biblical concept, the word being used well over 600 times. In fact, when Jesus gave what we’ve come to call the Great Commission to the eleven in Matthew 28, he told them to make disciples of all nations (ethnos in Greek), not all people (anthropos in Greek). In Acts 17 the Apostle Paul lays out the case for the God ordained nature of nations:

26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

You can’t get more biblically unequivocal than that!

This secular myth of neutrality leads many Christians to mistakenly believe religious freedom means a type of pluralism where all faiths are equally welcome at a neutral public table with mutual respect and tolerance for all. A perfect example of this misconception comes from David French, a one-time conservative who became an implacable foe of Donald Trump (joining what came to be called the NeverTrumpers). This quote comes from an article in the left-wing Atlantic magazine titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet”:

The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions.

This magic world of America French invents out of whole cloth never existed, because in God’s created reality, currently fallen and chock full of sinners, such a pluralist Utopia does not and cannot exist. In fact, America was founded as a Protestant republic with shared biblical assumptions and the Bible as its foundational religious text. Most people don’t realize, obviously including David French, that for the first approximately 170 years of America’s history most states had anti-blasphemy and sabbath laws. Doesn’t sound very magical or pluralistic to me!

What French and others like him seem to miss is that we are living in an era when America’s (and the West’s) established religion is secular progressivism, otherwise known as wokeness (i.e., cultural Marxism). It has its own anti-blasphemy laws, as we know all too well. Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, states an unalterable fact of existence:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

He suggests there have been at least five sources of such authority in Western civilization, the current being “individualistic nihilism.” Any society basing its ultimate source of authority on separate and isolated individuals, and their choices as the ultimate or highest good of existence, will in fact lead to nothingness(nihilism) and the despair and frustration associated with it. There is plenty of evidence of this. In 2022 almost 50,000 people committed suicide in America, and triple that number tried. We have the sacred choice of the individual as the final source of authority and the nihilism it creates to thank for these tragic statistics.

Every nation has some kind of religious establishment, some foundation upon which social order or disorder is based, and the consequences will naturally follow. As Christians we can either stick our heads in the sand and pretend neutrality exists, or start thinking seriously and rigorously about what a Christian nation would look like. We can’t know this because God only gives us the broad contours of the blessings righteousness brings to a nation, and every nation is different, but civic and cultural engagement is a necessity if this is to happen.

The reason we are where we are is that Enlightenment rationalism bequeathed to us liberalism to one degree or another (a complicated discussion). Liberalism with the God of Scripture in Christ, largely because of the Puritans and the First Great awakening, gave us America; liberalism without Him gave us the French Revolution. There is no in between. Secularism will always eventually allow no competitors in the public square. Americans were sold a bill of goods that once secularism pushed the God of the Bible off the public and cultural stage all would be sweetness and light. It hasn’t turned out that way because it never could. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, Scripture tells us, the nation that abandons Him, well, America circa 2020s is the result.

In the West we will either have Christian nations or secular nations, and secular nations will always tend to totalitarian because they have rejected the only true basis of liberty—the Bible, God’s law and word.

The Kingdom, the Church, and the Nation
Related to the issue of a Christian nation, is the problem of the modern confusion in conflating the Church with the kingdom of God. Until recently I believed the kingdom was the church, and the church the kingdom. This is not true. The kingdom of God or heaven is God’s rule or reign on earth brought by God’s redeemed people, not by church bodies as such. It is also not just saved Christians who advance God’s kingdom on earth, but saved Christians who apply their biblical and Christian worldview to every square inch of life, a la Abraham Kuyper who said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” God’s kingdom is also advanced by non-Christians who embrace Christian values and assumptions about the nature of reality and apply them. Worldviews have consequences, and our job as faithful Christians is to inculcate the Christian worldview into the culture, which is a people’s beliefs externalized and applied. The ultimate goal is people imbibing a Christian worldview instead of the poison of the secular woke cultural Marxism they currently do. No culture, like its government, is worldview neutral.

I long struggled with what as conservative and Evangelical Christians we’re trying to accomplish. What exactly is a Christian society or nation? What does such a thing look like? Is it fifty-one percent of the people being professing Christians? I was always frustrated because I knew intuitively what makes a nation Christian isn’t just the number of Christians. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in Western history where the vast majority of people in the nations of Christendom were Christians, yet the people, Christian or not, considered themselves living in Christian nations. Most Christians seem to believe if we just convert enough people things will magically change for the better. It doesn’t work that way.

Unfortunately, we’re often confronted with a false dilemma. Either we go back to a form of Christendom where a particular Church or denomination had ultimate authority in the culture with the associated tyranny, or accept that we live in a secular pluralist age where at best we at least get a seat at the societal table. These, thankfully, are not the only two choices; I would argue neither is the Christian choice—unless our goal is totalitarianism. Neither Christian nor pagan (i.e., secular) totalitarianism lead to good results as the historical evidence makes painfully clear. There are, however, only two ultimate choices—the rule of God or the rule of man—God or paganism. It is abundantly clear how the latter works, but there is unfortunately an abundance of confusion about how the former would work in the modern world. The rule of God in a nation isn’t really difficult to understand, but ignorance and secular programming makes it so. Bringing such a reality to pass is another story.

Christians who have a problem with “Christian nationalism” warn us that America is not a theocracy like ancient Israel, but I don’t know any Christian who believes it is. God, however, has a relationship to every country on earth, and blesses or curses those nations to the degree they look to Him as the ultimate governor and ruler of the nation. You can have either a Christian nation or a pagan nation; there is no in between. We can either be a nation with a Christian self-conception, as America was until the mid-20th century, or a secular self-conception, as we’ve been ever since.

This makes it war on two fronts, cultural and political. I realized some time ago just focusing on politics alone was a fool’s errand. I overcompensated for a while thinking it was all about the culture which eventually trickles down to politics. It is, however, very much a two-way street—culture affects politics, and politics affects culture. But for most Evangelical Christians, once you get past the personal salvation of someone’s soul and start talking about Christianizing the nation, they get nervous, and to the theocracy charge they go. We need to change that. A Christian nation has no choice but to be a theocracy, properly understood.

What Exactly is a Theocracy?
Which brings us to the meaning of this word that causes so much consternation and keeps too many Christians from embracing the necessity of a Christian nation.

First, what does theocracy mean? It comes from a Greek compound word for God (theos) and rule (krateo) which doesn’t sound so bad, right? If we’re Christians, all of reality is theocracy, but throughout history those acting in the name of God gave the term its tyrannical baggage. According to Mark Rushdoony,

Theocracy is falsely assumed to be a take-over of government, imposing biblical law on an unwilling society. This presupposes statism which is the opposite of theocracy. Because modern people only understand power as government, they assume that’s what we want.

The key words are “imposing” and “unwilling.” All secularists, be they religious or not, believe if we bring Christianity and God’s law into the public square, we will be “imposing” our faith and it’s moral values on others. Believing this, skeptics of an ignorant type make the statement, “You can’t legislate morality,” which is like saying, you can’t cook food; food is what you cook, as morality is what you legislate. The only issue is whose morality, and from whence it comes.

In fact, as we see clearly, the secular leftist state is tyrannically imposing its morality, the latest example being transgenderism where the state by force of law dictates that biological males must be allowed to compete in girls and women’s sports, and use women’s bathrooms. Talk about “imposing” law on an “unwilling” society! Few people in Western societies are secular progressive absolutist woke leftists who believe sex is merely a social construct changeable at will, yet the woke have no problem imposing their policies on an unwilling society. In fact, God’s law is always and everywhere for all time a reflection of His being, and He calls all to obedience to it if they are to experience His blessing and true human flourishing.

The rule of law informed by God’s law is a distinctly Christian notion over against the will to power of paganism, and because of it, liberty was established in Christian Western civilization. It’s either God and liberty, or secularism and tyranny or anarchy, the logical conclusion of man’s law without God. Secularism is a jealous god, and it will have no other gods before it which is why a proper understanding of theocracy is so important. Christians must understand something the Christians of the first three centuries of the church understood all too well: “Jesus Christ is Lord” is a political statement. If they refused to confess Caesar as Lord they were seen by the Roman state as a threat to its absolute power. This is exactly where we are in the 21st century West.

Once we get rid of the distortion, then what makes a specific nation Christian is one ruled by the law of God under Christ. What it does not mean is being ruled by the church institute. Medieval Catholicism gave us that model, which was rejected in due course by the English from Alfred the Great to Magna Carta, to the Glorious Revolution, and eventually to America’s founding. But what would the rule of God’s law in a society look like? To flesh that out in such a short space is impossible, and there is and will always be much disagreement. My goal is to persuade Christians to simply be open to the concept of the law of God in Christ as the only Christian option against secular totalitarianism.

Finally, I want to establish the spiritual nature of this enterprise, of building a Christian nation under God’s law in Christ. It can only come when a growing number of conservative Christians take the Great Commission and the dominion and cultural mandates seriously. It will be the work of the Holy Spirit as He applies Christ’s redemption to His people. There are enough serious Bible believing Christians in American to make a fundamental difference, far more than the woke leftists who dominated politics and culture in the Biden years. The question is the will to do it, and the theological justification for it. There are also a growing number of non-Christians, agnostics, and atheists who affirm Christianity as central to, and necessary for, Western civilization to succeed. In other words, we have allies who are not Christians in this existential war against the totalitarian left, and this is deeply significant. Part of the process is educating non-Christians that true liberty of conscience and freedom of religion is only available in a Christian nation whose ultimate authority is the word and law of God, not the church nor the state.