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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Societal Transformation by the Sword of the Spirit

Societal Transformation by the Sword of the Spirit

Nov 13, 2024 | Eschatology, Politics & Government, The Gospel

When I embraced postmillennialism after four plus decades as a Christian, I encountered ideas I’d never seriously considered before, like theonomy, or what God’s law over a nation would look like. Or what a Christian nation is, or even that a nation should be Christian. Ever since I first read Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There around 1980, I’ve always been a worldview Christian who wanted Christianity to influence the culture, but I never considered the nuts and bolts of governing a society from a biblical perspective. Like many Christians I wanted the Christian worldview to influence how our country is governed, but being a post-World War II conservative I was for all intents and purposes secular. I didn’t believe the so called separation of church and state meant the separation of religion and state, yet the idea of our nation or any nation being specifically Christian was never something I considered until postmillennialism.

Like most Evangelical Christians, I read the Great Commission of Matthew 28 through a Pietist lens. We’ll remember Jesus’ charge to the eleven disciples:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Even though Jesus distinctly said “nations,” like most others I read it as, “make disciples of all individual people.” I’m sure I thought a corporate body like a nation can’t be discipled, so Jesus must mean individual people, that is if I ever thought about it at all, which I didn’t. Clearly Jesus used the word nation to give us a vision of the worldwide nature of the great commission, that it would be people, as the Apostle John says in Revelation 5, “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” But post post-mill, I now looked more closely at the word nation in Greek, which is ἔθνος-ethnos, which means a race, people, nation, “or people joined by practicing similar customs or common culture.” It is instructive that he didn’t use a comparable Greek word for persons, for individuals. Since God doesn’t use words randomly in Scripture, this choice of wording by Jesus must be significant.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. I’ve found whenever the topic of a Christian nation comes up (let’s stay away from the loaded term Christian nationalism), most Christians, let alone non-Christians, think of force. I wrote about this recently after I heard Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College say, “a Christian nation is an oxymoron.” I yelled at my little MP3 player as I was listening to him say that, “No, Larry, a Christian nation is not a contradiction in terms!” Why would he think such a thing? Why would any Christian think such a thing? Because, as he implied when he continued to explain, if a nation is Christian, that means Christians are forcing the people of the nation to believe and behave a certain way. No, Larry, they are not! That’s not what Christians do, ever, even if some have done it in the past. Mark Rushdoony explains why Arnn and others believe this:

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.

Yes, there was a time in Christendom when Protestants and Catholics killed one another because of their beliefs. It had more to do with geopolitics than faith per se, but nonetheless, Bloody Mary Tudor of England killed some 300 Protestants who refused to repent and become Catholics, burning them at the stake. And Catholics murdered several thousand Huguenots (Calvinists) in France during the infamous St. Bartholmew’s Day Massacre in 1572. As the Reformation grew, Protestants fought back and we got the so called Wars of Religion. You get the picture. That’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about a Christian nation. Nobody can be or should be forced to believe anything.

The Failed Rationale of Secularism
This fratricide among Christians lead to the development of the Enlightenment concept of secularism, the idea that a nation could be irreligious, or secular, and that would obviate the need for Christians to kill one another. Nobody would be forced to believe something against their will. That was the idea anyway. It hasn’t exactly worked out as secularists thought it would. As we can see, secularism hasn’t turned out to be the pluralistic peaceful Utopia its adherents promised. The reason is simple to understand. No government can be morally neutral, and some worldview, some faith commitment, some religion, will always drive the moral framework, i.e., laws, of a nation. In the history of the world, Christianity was the only religion and worldview that gave us liberty and the rule of law, which is critical to understand if we’re to contrast it with secularism, which inevitably leads to tyranny, something modern secularists, both Christian and non-Christian, do not seem to realize.

I need to repeat my claim, strongly, so it’s clear, especially to conservatives who still buy into the myth of neutrality: Secularism will always inevitably lead to tyranny. America and the West circa 2024 is exhibit A. We call this version of tyranny woke, a variant of cultural Marxism. Only a Christian nation, a nation committed to Christ as its ultimate sovereign, and the Bible as its ultimate moral guide, will allow for true freedom of conscience and political liberty. Secularism, by contrast, can give us no rational for liberty because all the competing worldview (moral) claims in a pluralistic “Utopia” have an equal claim upon ultimate authority, and only one can win. The secular state always has the upper hand because it claims to be irreligious, and the people assume it can be too. The referee is not in the game but determines the rules of the game and will enforce those rules, which will always be moral and thus religious in nature. The inevitable totalitarian nature of secularism is well made in the book Classical Apologetics by Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsley:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

And this was written in 1984! Secularism has proved to be a jealous God, and if you question that God, the state, you will be made to pay. The delusion of secularism is part of what came to be called the post-World War II “consensus.” The illusion held when the remnant of Christian culture was still the worldview of most Westerners, but in a post-Christian environment secularist statism has turned completely anti-Christian. We’ve had to re-learn something the early church quickly realized. The assertion that “Jesus is Lord” is a political statement, one which means Caesar is not. Our ultimate allegiance is to the Lord Jesus Christ revealed to us in Scripture, and thus it cannot be to the state. The only means for the state to enforce its will is the sword, or violence, because the state is power not persuasion. That is the distinction we must understand if we’re to get it right as we implement Christendom 2.0.

Christianity and Liberty by the Sword
When we speak of the sword in the context of a Christian nation, it has a dual meaning, and both of these meanings are the only foundation for true liberty. The seed of this liberty goes back four thousand years ago. After the flood and the Lord scattering the people from Babel, humanity was heathen, and would have remained so, lost to truth, had not God taken the initiative and called one man, only one, out of Ur of the Chaldeans (southern Iraq) to go to Canaan. This was the bifurcation point of history which created the two branches of humanity, the heathens, whom God did not call, and His people, starting with this one man. Think of it as the proverbial fork in the road. Down one fork, sinful humanity remains benighted, lost in sin and darkness, trying to figure out reality and what it means, but only having the revelation of creation. Down the other are God’s people given verbal revelation directly from the Creator God.

God promised Abram all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him, and the theme of blessing the nations runs throughout Genesis. Most see the word blessing and think of a kind of vague happiness, things going well, circumstances to our liking, something like that. This is not at all what the Bible means by blessing. Christians can be blessed in very bad circumstances because they belong to their God, forever, but God’s blessing extends to every human being. A simple definition is to bestow divine favor. I like to extend this definition from something I heard in a lecture on the book of Genesis by Dr. Mark Futato of Reformed Theological Seminary. He defines blessing as empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he puts it, “God empowers people to flourish.” I love that! Secularists paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

And despite what Satan wants us to believe, that God is a big meanie and he’s parsimonious with his blessings, it’s clear from Genesis and in God’s covenant promises to Abram that these blessings are to touch so many people they literally can’t be counted (sand of the seashore, stars in the sky, and dust of the earth). God is not miserly in spreading his blessings on earth, but this does not mean His blessings do not include adversity or in some cases suffering. Immediately after the fall, we realize all of God’s blessing is done in the face of a cosmic spiritual war to frustrate the devil’s plans. As we’re told, thorns and thistles. This means it will never be easy and we will encounter constant adversity and opposition. As I taught my kids as they were growing up and still as they are adults, life is constant friction, resistance at every step. But as muscles only grow stronger when there is resistance, so does our character and holiness.

Because Christ rose from the dead and was seated at the right hand of God “over all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named,” (Eph. 1:21) he empowers us through the adversity and friction and resistance to flourish, in fact flourish in the face of and because of it. As I also taught and still teach my kids, we learn nothing from success. This is where the swords come in and how both are required if a nation is to experience true liberty.

The State, The Gospel, and the Sword
The two biblical swords have different purposes in a society, and we must not confuse the two, as many have done in the history of the church. First, Paul describes the sword utilized by the state in Romans 13:

3 For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. 4 For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

We notice those who abide by the law, doing right, have nothing to fear from the state. Liberty can only be had within the confines of well-defined and just laws people willingly abide by. America was bequeathed the rule of law from almost 900 years of British history, which means in the words of Samuel Rutherford’s 1644 book, Lex Rex, law is king. Rutherford states, “A man commanding unjustly and ruling tyrannically has in that no power from God.” Thus, from Alfred the Great in the ninth century grew the common law, and the idea that even the king was under law, a radically new notion in the history of the world, a power British kings would not easily relinquish.

This was a specifically Christian idea that separated the Christian nation from the pagan nation. It’s one or the other, the law over the ruler, or the ruler over the law. A secular nation is a pagan nation, and thus man’s law not God’s law rules, and the result is tyranny, as we see in America and the West today. The answer is theonomy, however we define it, God’s law not man’s law as the ultimate authority over the state. This is the point at which Christian secularists get terribly confused, thinking theonomy means using the sword of the state to enforce certain beliefs. It does not! Freedom of conscience that came through European, primarily English, history gave us America’s First Amendment, the freedom of religion, and what we’ve come to know as the separation of church and state. The church institute, as Joe Boot calls it, does not exercise any coercive power over individuals, nor does the state outside of enforcing civil and criminal law. 

We must understand this, and teach Christians and non-Christians alike, that we advance the Christian cause in society by words, first God’s words then ours. People and societies are transformed not by force, but by reason; as the Lord says through Isaiah, come let us reason together (Is. 1:18). Greg Bahnsen in his Theonomy in Christian Ethics puts it well:

Christ repudiates the use of the sword in spreading the gospel of the kingdom because this task belongs to His church, and the church and state are sperate (as the Old Testament taught and Christ confirmed). The civil magistrate may use the sword as the proper means of enforcement, but the church may not.

And you do not get more theonomic than the late great Greg Bahnsen. Yet most conservative Christians, like Larry Arnn, believe a Christian nation means using force to advance Christianity. The reason, again, is the persistent myth of secular neutrality. The Book of Revelation is also an excellent source for understanding this critical distinction. We notice in the following verses the sword Jesus uses to advance his kingdom.

In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. (Rev. 1:16)

“To the angel of the church in Pergamum write: These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. (Rev. 2:12)

Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth. (Rev. 2:16)

Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. (Rev. 19:15)

The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse. (Rev. 19:21)

From the moment the Apostle John wrote these words in the first century, the sword of the word of God has gone forth to conquer the nations and advance His kingdom of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 4:17).

 

 

Is the Phrase Christian Nation an Oxymoron?

Is the Phrase Christian Nation an Oxymoron?

Aug 28, 2024 | Politics & Government

Unfortunately, most of the modern conservative movement thinks so, including one of the most respected men in my conservative world, Hillsdale college President Larry Arnn. He said exactly this in a discussion on his podcast. Ironically, the title of the episode is, Bold Christianity in a Secular World. Yet Arnn thinks a Christian nation is a contradiction in terms. That means America should remain a secular nation, right? Here is the question: Are we to have a secular nation or a Christian nation? Those are our only choices. The further question is, what do each of those choices mean. Larry Arnn, as brilliant as he is, like many post-World War II “consensus” conservatives seems to have no idea what either means. He made that very clear in his comments toward the end of the discussion.

Arnn is one of my favorite people in the world. I got to know of him when my daughter started attending Hillsdale College in 2010. I heard many of his talks, read a couple of his books, and was always impressed with his breadth of knowledge and wisdom. I’ve gotten Imprimis, their monthly speech digest, since the early 1980s, so I’ve been a longtime fan of Hillsdale. I had just graduated from Arizona State University in 1982 when I learned about Hillsdale and was bummed out I hadn’t gone there. In my wildest dreams I would never have imagined my own daughter would go there (and she now works for Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative). In 2013, he started joining Hugh Hewitt every Friday for what they called the Hillsdale Dialogues, and I’ve listened to those consistently over the years. Although Arnn is a traditional conservative, it was him taking Trump seriously during those dialogues that opened my mind to Trump when I didn’t think it possible.

His contribution to the conservative movement through Hillsdale has been impressive and important, but secularism is a blind spot for conservatism, and one that needs to be addressed. One of the fronts in the war to re-establishing America as a Christian nation is getting conservative Christians to realize secularism is the enemy, and that pluralism based on secularism is a recipe for totalitarianism. The only basis for real liberty of conscience and true pluralism is Christianity and God’s law. Most secularists, Christian or non-Christian, believe Christianity and God’s law at a societal governing level are a basis for tyranny. Thus to them, like Arnn, a Christian nation is an oxymoron. For someone who knows Aristotle so well, Arnn begs the question like a pro, assuming this conclusion as if it were a self-evident truth. In a Christian nation, he implies, rulers will force Christianity on the ruled. Who in the world believes that!? Not anyone who believes God has called nations to be Christian as a result of the great commission. Yet, this fallacious belief persists for a reason, even in the minds of intelligent people. Why?

The Source of the “Theocracy is Tyranny” Lie
The idea that a Christian nation is an oxymoron, or that God’s rule (theocracy) based on Christ in a society, is inherently tyrannical exists for a reason. It came primarily from a certain slice of Christendom 1.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, where tyrannical force was indeed used to coerce belief in certain things. We know this as the Inquisition, a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established in the 12th century by the Catholic Church to identify heresy. Before we Protestants get on our high horses, our forebearers thought they too could compel belief. This is a complicated situation of the Middle Ages that historical ignorance and bias only makes worse. Religion and state were not separated, and to think people at the time should have thought otherwise is, as C.S. Lewis put it, chronological snobbery. Protestant Christian princes, and everyone else, thought that heresy would create societal instability, and it must be stopped. Catholics get the worst press, however.

Bloody Mary’s purge of Protestants in Tudor England from 1553-1558 is a primary example where an estimated 300 Protestants were burned at the stake for not converting to Catholicism. In Germany, Martin Luther’s heresy against Catholic dogma was seen as a threat to the Holy Roman Empire’s political authorities. He was called to stand before the Diet (Assembly) of Worms in 1521 and recant. When he declared his freedom of conscience it changed the direction of Western Civilization, slowly but surely, in the direction of religious liberty. Commanded to repudiate his writings, he stood against an array of powerful clergy and statesmen asserting he could not go against his conscience. The official transcript quotes him as saying:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason (I do not accept the authority of popes and councils because they have contradicted each other), my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. So help me God. Amen.

In Luther’s collected works his closing words come down to us most famously as, “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.” Nothing like this, a declaration of freedom of conscience, had ever been said before.

You can’t leave a discussion of Christianity and tyranny in the Middle Ages without addressing the case of Michael Servetus. He was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553. Supposedly this was John Calvin’s doing, but it was the Geneva city council that condemned him for heresy and called for his execution. Calvin agreed, but tried to have him executed by sword rather than burning at the stake, a more merciful death. The council refused and Servetus was executed. He was a wanted man all over Europe, so this would have happened no matter where he went. Denying the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ were capital offenses throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. To make Calvin the bad guy is disingenuous because he couldn’t have saved his life even if he wanted to.

Moving forward to the 17th century we see progress for religious liberty. Puritans like Oliver Cromwell proclaimed freedom of conscience, although not quite up to modern standards. After his reign ended in 1660, Catholic King Charles II did the same, again not as we would understand it, but this was unique in the world of that time. Especially important for religious liberty is the development of the rule of law in England, starting with Alfred the Great in the 9th century. In 1215 Magna Carta was passed which started the process of taking absolute power away from kings. It was the Glorious Revolution in 1688 that cemented the idea in Western civilization. The 17th century also saw Puritans, called dissenters, flee England for the New World which was instrumental in starting what eventually would become America. Speaking of the rule of law and America, I will mention the Salem Witch trials (June 1692–May 1693) in passing because skeptic and Christian both use it as a cudgel to try to discredit theocracy. In fact, in due course the rule of law in this Puritan community worked to finally discredit the injustice and hysteria just as it was supposed to, the fruit of almost 800 years of English history.

Theocracy is Inescapable Because Neutrality Is Impossible
Skeptics mock the “dark ages” of religious persecution and blame it on Christianity, specifically “theocracy.” Handmaiden’s Tale is only the most ridiculous expression of something even most Christians believe, that the rule of Christianity and God’s law is inherently tyrannical. Self-righteous censorious Christians can unfortunately give some credibility to that slander, but standing for God’s law will never be easy in a fallen world. Unfortunately, the answer for skeptic and Christian secularists alike is the rule of secularism, a truly neutral public square where justice and not religion rule. Such a thing, however, has never existed because it cannot exist. A nation’s culture and laws are a reflection of its worldview, its faith commitments. Its culture and laws are the externalization of its religion. Doug Wilson calls this “inescapable theonomy” because “all societies are theocratic.”

That this is now denied across the ideological and religious spectrum, and secularism unquestioned dogma, goes back 300 years to the developing Enlightenment, so called, in Western culture. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutrality assumes that religion is fundamentally a private, personal thing that only messes up the tranquility of society if it is brought into how a society is governed.

Fortunately, in Western history we have two experiments in government by which we can see the religious/secular contrast, the American and French Revolutions. The former was drenched in Protestant biblical Christianity, and the latter in hostile anti-religious secularism. The results speak for themselves. However, the proponents of secularism will tell us the radical nature of the French experiment isn’t typical but extreme, and secularism is able to give us a kinder and gentler non-religious public square. The problem with such an understanding of secularism is that in practice it can never hold up. The West is a perfect example. As long as Christianity as a cultural force endured, the religious tendencies of secularism were held at bay, but as soon as Christianity was completely dethroned, we see the true nature of secularism. What do I mean by this?

R.J. Rushdoony wrote a book in 1959 called, By What Standard? The title says it all: there must be a standard, whether for personal or societal morality. The foundation of a nation’s laws, and what is considered right or wrong, good or evil, legal or not, must be based on some kind of standard. For the Christian nation, that standard is God’s law in biblical revelation, for the secular nation that standard is human reason. The history of philosophy tells us that developing a moral standard, personally or societally, without the revelation of God is a slippery thing. Ultimately the question must always be asked, says who? Somebody must have the last say, and the two revolutions tell us unequivocally that will be either God in Scripture or man and his reason. Secularism will always end in tyranny, and as such is a perversion of true theocracy. We must educate fellow Christians that this is biblical truth.

America’s Secular Founding?
Secularists will argue that this is a false choice. Christians and conservatives in the mold of Larry Arnn believe natural law is sufficient to bring Christians and heathens together in agreeable harmony about what is right or wrong in a society. I ask a simple question: natural law based on what? Post WWII conservatives like Arnn seem to miss this point thinking that America’s Declaration of Independence is an example of a kind of secular founding of a country. It most certainly is not! Even those who argue that America’s founding was Christian believe because of the modern changed religious demographics of America, a neutral secular pluralism is required, but secular pluralism has failed, and we can’t tweak it to success. Natural Law must come from somewhere, be based on something.

For most of my adult Christian and conservative life, north of 40 years, I had no biblical categories for a Christian nation. Like all Christians I longed for more Christian influence in culture and politics but had no idea how that would happen. I had never thought through my own Christian political philosophy, but my latest book was an opportunity to do that. As I discuss there, we have an argument today over the interpretation of America’s founding. Was it Christian, was it secular, or was it something in between. The Marxists tell us it was fundamentally evil, while all normal Americans believe it was fundamentally good. Unfortunately, much scholarship in the 20th century bought into the secular founding myth, including Christian scholars. Mark David Hall in Did America Have a Christian Founding? dismantles that contention, but shows even respected 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.” As I argued, none of America’s most famous founders were doctrinaire Deists, and the rest were in fact orthodox Christians. Hall contends only one, Ethan Allen, could be considered such a Deist.

The conservative movement since its inception in the 1950s with William F. Buckley’s National Review, has had an inter-conservative squabble between those who believe America’s founding was secular, and those who believe it was Christian. A good example is an article in American Greatness by

Edward J. Erler. He writes about Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall, and this paragraph makes clear Erler falls into the secular trap. Speaking of the Mayflower Compact, he says

What was its attraction for Kendall? It was pre-Locke—although that didn’t preclude it having “Lockean” elements—it didn’t mention equality, and it did, albeit in passing, make a bow to Christianity, whereas the Declaration’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” seemed to make a secular reference to Divine Providence.

Except it doesn’t. Whatever Jefferson’s personal religious beliefs, he lived in an America that was 98 percent Protestant. He believed when he wrote this, and everyone who read it did as well, that this God of nature was the God of the Old and New Testaments. It wasn’t some far off clockmaker God who made and let nature take its course, but the providentially intervening God who ordains history. Read any founding documents or public proclamations and that becomes abundantly clear. At the Constitutional convention, supposed Diest Benjamin Franklin said these words to the august attendees which could come out of the mouth of any fervent Evangelical of that time or now:

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.

Liberty Depends on Christianity
This is the fundamental fact of human political existence that secular conservatives and Christians miss, and the founders understood. It seems obvious to me, but it is not obvious to many brilliant people who should know better. The Puritans gave us the Great awakening which had a profound influence on America’s founding. America’s thirteen colonies were a geographical amalgam of Congregational (democratic), Presbyterian (oligarchical), and Anglican (monarchical) peoples who came to America to run their own lives with limited oversite from government. The Atlantic Ocean made that necessity into a compelling reason to break the bonds with their mother country, but it was Christianity alone that provided the necessary and sufficient conditions for liberty, while the Enlightenment without Christianity led to the French Revolution and disaster.

We’ve also seen over time that as Christianity’s influence in the West declined, secularism become increasingly dogmatic and tyrannical. In the 21st century West we have the theocracy of woke. R.C. Sproul said that “the inevitable omega point of secularism” is statism. And the state, every state, has some ultimate moral standard upon which to base its laws. Either that will be Christianity which gives us the limited state of America’s founding, or without Christianity the unlimited tyrannical state. Here is my claim, and one which every Christian should agree with but unfortunately won’t: secularism can never give us liberty and a limited state. The state (i.e., nation), any state and every state, must be under God, the God of the Old and New Testaments, under King Jesus, if they are to recognize their boundaries.

Because of the Great Commission (Matt. 28), and Christ bringing God’s kingdom to push back sin and the fall, every discipled nation will be a Christian nation. All Christians, it seems, want Christianity to influence government and laws, but they won’t go all the way and declare that the nation should officially be proclaimed a Christian nation. If we want liberty and justice for all, that is our only option.

 

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

Aug 14, 2024 | Politics & Government

That name is likely not familiar to you, as it wasn’t to me until recently. He is the President of El Salvador. I knew something of El Salvador’s turnaround over the last five years, but knew few details, or how drastic it has been. I also knew nothing about the man who led the effort. He came to my full attention recently when I listened to his interview with Tucker Carlson. He was initially elected president in June of 2019 when El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on earth with nearly 110 homicides per 100,000 people. Compare that to today when the country has just 2.3, making it safer than the United States and Canada. This piece at IM—1776.com called, “Bukele’s War for Peace” gets into the details of how they accomplished it.

This transformation reminded me of Trump’s victory over ISIS. Remember during the Obama years when beheadings and torture were commonplace, sickening videos popping up all the time. During the campaign Trump said beating ISIS would be easy, and it would happen very quickly. Obama, by contrast, had said the war against ISIS and terrorism would be a long slog, a generational battle, and implied it would go on for the foreseeable future and there was nothing we could do to change that. This is typical of liberals and leftists, their weakness and compromise with evil always leads to more evil, which always means not punishing evildoers. We see this in American blue cities, and especially since the current radical leftist regime took power in 2021. As a Christian, Bukele took seriously Paul’s charge in Romans 13, that as a ruler he is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on those who do evil. His first priority was peace, and wrath is how he would make it happen.

What stood out to me, though, wasn’t his strategy to punish violent criminals, the gangs that controlled the country. Rather, one of his primary strategies for success was to pray to God for Wisdom. When Tucker asks him how they did it, how they accomplished something nobody thought they could, including against the leftists ruling the country at the time that tried to stop him, he gave two reasons. One was the “official” reason, the strategies and tactics to defeat criminal gangs and restore peace. When Tucker asked him about the other reason, he said, “It was a miracle.” Then he explains as the gangs fought back and things started looking bad, his government had meetings, and they prayed. Not just once, but several times, and God gave them the victory. He says El Salvador is a secular country, but in fact he accomplished job one of a Christian prince and government, one ruled by God’s law: peace. In the article I linked to above we learn that El Salvador, contrary to Bukele, is de facto a Christian Country:

It is the most religious population on earth, dominated by evangelicals, mostly Pentecostals, and they responded strongly to his message of carrying out a holy war against the satanic gangs. Even if we had a Bukele, it is questionable whether our weak, watered-down, secular first-world societies would stick with him and back him the way Salvadorans have consistently done with Bukele, returning him to office this Sunday with nearly 90% of the vote.

Can you imagine, almost 90% of the country voted for success and peace, not failure. America, on the other hand, has probably 40% of the voting public who continue to vote for failure. If you look at blue states and cities, what do you see? A populace that continues to vote for Democrats who continue to bring misery and suffering to the population. It makes no sense, but when does evil ever make sense.

This is why every morning I pray the Four R’s for America: revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The re-founding of America as the Christian nation it was founded to be is a gospel, Holy Spirit led project. The founders of America believed it was God’s providence alone that would give them the victory over the British. I look at the print of Washington on his knees at Valley Forge in my office as I pray. All of the founders understood and believed what  the supposed Deist Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention:

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.

He couldn’t say it any better for all those today who war against the ever present threat of Babel in our time. Bukele understood this, and so must we.

The Case Against Secularism
The reason I’m writing about this isn’t because of the man who engineered a victory over evil in his country, but because as Christians we need to understand it is specifically Christianity that made it possible, not secularism. This is a difficult thing for most Christians to understand and embrace, let alone those who don’t proclaim the name of Jesus. Secularism is the enemy, full stop. The entire history of secularism, the fruit of its Enlightenment inspiration is a lie. It may not seem like it, but secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, only most Westerners and Americans haven’t realized it yet. Secularism promised everything but delivered nothing but misery and despair. The disaster of secularism was inevitable because it is based on faulty premises and an inaccurate understanding of reality. In other words, it’s all a lie, and in the end lies will be revealed for what they are, lies. Truth will always win, sooner or later, because of the One who is the Truth.

Initially Secularism was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” place, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence.

Imagine this public square as a big banquet table, the place where citizens get together to discuss how we as a people and nation should be governed. Every place setting has one of those little cards you see at weddings with names on it to indicate who is to sit where, except at this table the cards read religions. So at one setting is Buddhism, at another Hinduism, at another atheism, and so on, and there are many chairs. Out of the dozens of settings is a place for Christianity, and for many Christians they are grateful to even have a seat at the table at all. It feels like, rather, that we’ve been relegated to the kids’ table. This setting is seen by Christians, as well as the dominant secular culture, as a healthy pluralism where everyone has an equal chance to make their case. This all assumes the myth is truth, secular neutrality, and that Christianity is happy to at least have a seat at the table.

If this myth had been accepted in the 18th century, there would never have been an America. Most Christians, let alone, most Americans, have no idea how critically important Christianity was to the founding of America. In fact, if there was no Christianity there would have been no America. Read the primary sources if you don’t believe me. The secular “scholars” have for decades claimed America was solely an Enlightenment project. It was not. This claim is pure bias or ignorance, or a combination of the two. My claim, by contrast, is that if America is to be re-founded, it will be because of Christianity and Christians taking responsibility to make that happen. What stands in our way is the enemy, secularism.

It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (An apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

The authors further state the obvious:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

I could not agree with this more, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year.

The Necessity of Christian Rulers and a Christian Nation
I can’t make this case fully in this short space, but I made it more fully in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. First I will have to assert that nations are a biblical concept, and that God deals with nations as ethical entities who can be judged or rewarded based on their obedience to His law and their faithfulness, or not, to Christ. Next I will assert and try to prove, briefly, that God’s law is as applicable today for the nations as it was to Israel. The mode of application is different post Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, because no nation is ancient Israel. And as I lay out in the book, we live with over a thousand years of the concept of common law and case law that started with King Alfred the Great in England in the 9th century. Alfred based his law on the Ten Commandments, and the freedom and liberty assumed in God’s law was painstakingly worked out in England until fulfilled most fully in the American experiment.

As Doug Wilson says in his latest book, Mere Christendom, “Limited government is the theopolitical genius of Christianity.” The point of God’s law, and the American experience in self-government, is that selves should be able to govern themselves! Government exists for very limited means, as the Founders argued, and one of those limited means is to punish evildoers. This responsibility as given to us by revelation in God’s word is why Nayib Bukele is a Christian prince, a ruler who takes his God-given responsibilities seriously. If you listen to the interview with Tucker, listen to him share what the transformation has done for his country. People who fled for their lives are now returning home to live among their own people and culture in peace. It is now, as he says, the safest country in the Western hemisphere. I don’t know his political philosophy beyond this, but creating a safe environment for his people is job one of the Christian ruler.

Which brings me to God’s law proper. It’s amazing to me that whenever God’s law is brought up as a requirement for a Christian nation, heathens and Christians alike run to the charge of . . . . theocracy! It’s a stupendously stupid charge because what they are saying is that God’s law is inherently tyrannical. If what Bukele did in El Salvadore is tyrannical, then yes, it is tyrannical. But in fact, what God’s law is, is the ground of liberty and freedom in a society. The point of law, it’s purpose, is not to force people to do or think anything (something progressives and leftists believe), but to keep people from doing evil, or things that will destroy the peace of a society. God’s law is the foundation for true human flourishing because God only blesses righteousness, doing right, not doing wrong or evil. So James tells us, twice (1:25 and 2:12), that God’s perfect law gives freedom. It is the guiderail within which people can live fully human lives. I say this a lot, but since secularism gained all the cultural power in America and shoved Christianity into the closet, people have become generally more miserable. That suicide rates, anxiety and depression, alcohol and drug abuse are all rampant proves the point; without Christ and God’s law, this is what you get.

Most importantly, and what allows peace, or in Hebrew, Shalom, is love, because love is the fulfillment of the law. In fact we can say that theonomy is love in practice on a societal level. Paul confirms this in Romans 13 when he says that “love is the fulfillment of the law.” I didn’t make this up. Paul got his teaching on love from Jesus who when asked which is the greatest commandment in the law summed it up as loving God, your neighbor, and yourself, the latter commandment he took from Leviticus 19:18. This kind of love, as with all love, can be hard, but it is necessary, tough love, without which a society will devolve into chaos and anarchy. Real love, biblical love, Godly love has nothing to do with feelings, least of all with Romance, but with action, righteousness, and justice.

A last point. A Christian nation isn’t a totalitarian nation, by definition it can’t be because in a Christian nation ruled by God’s law liberty is maximized for its in habitants. Self-government, and self-rule, requires a people not enslaved to their own lusts, wants, and desires, but a righteous people able to, well, govern themselves. Thus a Christian nation is a gospel centered nation, and the great need of the hour is what I call the Four Rs, and which I pray for every day: revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation.

 

Christianity is the Only Source of Political Liberty

Christianity is the Only Source of Political Liberty

Jan 10, 2024 | Politics & Government, Uncategorized

This is an assertion that many Christians, let alone secularists, will vehemently disagree with. Those who disagree, however, need to bone up on their history of Christian Western civilization. Christian England is the only place on earth where the concept of the rule of law developed that could hold a ruler of the nation accountable. Prior to that, whatever the sovereign declared was law. It isn’t a difficult case to make that the only reason liberty exists at all in the world is because of Christianity. Without Christianity all we are left with is either the will to power and tyranny, or anarchy. When societies end up falling into the latter, people would much rather the tyranny; at least it’s predictable.

This is the dynamic in which we find ourselves as we begin the new year of 2024. It will either be anarchy leading the tyranny, or liberty. It’s one or the other. The only way to liberty is through Christ, so I’ll put my money on liberty. But to do this, we need to disabuse a very lot of people of the notion that the rule of Christianity in a nation is inherently tyrannical. They deride the concept with the epithet “theocracy,” as if the rule of God over a society, what the word means, is a bad thing. It most certainly is not! Of course, that all depends on what we mean by theocracy. I address all this in my upcoming book, and I look forward to seeing what people who disagree with me make of my argument. Hopefully, they’ll agree with me after they read it.

The Necessary Idea of Sphere Sovereignty
I’ve recently become aware of Willem Ouweneel, a Dutch scholar and prolific author. I’m currently reading his book; The World is Christ’s: A Critique of Two Kingdoms Theology. He argues that a Christian worldview requires the autonomy of certain societal relationship, like churches (synagogues, mosques, temples), marriages, families, schools, associations, businesses, political parties, etc. He states, “each is relatively autonomous within its own boundaries, and should be free from interference from either the state or the church.” By contrast, “The state has the responsibility to administer public justice.” That’s all. Needless to say, the state as conceived in the modern world per liberalism and much of what calls itself conservative, known as “the post WWII consensus,” is deeply unbiblical. What liberalism has done inspired by the secularism that created it, is claim that Christianity at the societal level is inherently tyrannical. The claim is spurious and easily refuted by Scripture and history, but the distortion runs deep. Here is the way Ouweneel counters it:

The notion of a Christian state does not imply that Christian authorities enforce Christian values upon its citizens, but that they administer public justice in a Christian way. The notion of a Christian school does not imply that Christian teachers force Christian values down their pupil’s throat, but that they teach and educate according to Christian principles.

The tyranny claim is a perfect example of projection, normally associated with leftists. Liberals (secular or religious, left or right) believe the state is the ultimate sovereign, and that the state can force people to do things ostensibly for their own good. R.J. Rushdoony explains why theocracy is so often misunderstood:

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.

In the Christian view, by contrast, the state has an extremely limited role, and the people within the spheres of sovereignty, like churches and families, are completely free from state intrusion except for public justice. If laws are broken, the state is responsible to adjudicate it.

The concept of sphere sovereignty is critical in the never-ending battle against the spirit of Babel, which is another word for the tyrannical centralizing state. The concept is as simple as it is contested by those who embrace that centralizing spirit. It was first introduced by the great Dutch theologian, statesman, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in a public address at the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam. The question comes down to authority and who wields it. Absolute sovereign authority rests in God alone, and He has delegated His authority on earth to human beings:

so that on earth one actually does not meet God Himself in things visible, but that sovereign authority is always exercised through an office held by men.

In this he asks two pertinent questions:

And in that assigning of God’s Sovereignty to an office held by man the extremely important question arises: how does that delegation of authority work? Is that all embracing Sovereignty of God delegated undivided to one single man; or does an earthly Sovereign possess the power to compel obedience only in a limited circle; a circle bordered by other circles in which another is Sovereign?

These spheres interact and overlap in society, but one sphere must never usurp the authority of the other. The only way this possibly works, and thus the only possibility of true liberty in any society, is the acknowledgement of the absolute Sovereignty of Christ. Kuyper explains why:

But behold now the glorious Freedom idea! That perfect and absolute Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time contains the direct denial and challenge of all absolute Sovereignty on earth in sinful man; because of the division of life into spheres, each with its own Sovereignty.

Stephen Wolfe in his book The Case for Christian Nationalism explains it well:

[I]t follows that every sphere of life requires a suitable authority, with a suitable power, to make determinations. For this reason, God has granted specific types of power by which the authorities of each sphere make judgments. The family has the pater familiar with patria potestas (“fatherly power”); civil life has the civil magistrate with civil power; the instituted church has the minister with spiritual power, and the individual has a power unto himself. The nature of each sphere dictates the species of power required. These powers and their differences are not arbitrary but arise from the nature of each sphere.

It is only when those in power acknowledge the power of God in Christ as the ultimate authority that the state will recognize its limits. This is the message the secularists (again, be they religious or not) need to be taught. The case, to me, doesn’t appear that hard to make.

Secularism and the Myth of Neutrality
The biggest enemy of liberty in our time is the myth of neutrality driven by secularism. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is the assumption of the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” place, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence.

Secular, understood classically in the medieval world prior to the Enlightenment, simply meant the mundane as opposed to the sacred. The Reformation rightly critiqued this dichotomy between the secular and the sacred as unbiblical, but the rationalism of Enlightenment thinkers ended up affirming the same dichotomy, only now religion ended up becoming dangerous to social harmony. As Christianity’s influence waned in Western civilization, secularism came to dominate the public square as a force hostile to Christianity, and in due course became the dominant worldview of the West. The hostility is expressed in manifold ways throughout government and every area of culture, but there is no need to inventory them here. We’re all too depressingly familiar with them as it is. What well-meaning Christians miss, unfortunately, is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism.

In Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.”

The impact of secularism…  . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics.…  . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

They wrote this almost 40 years ago, and we are now in the “later” they speak of—the vacuum has been fully filled. At the time they wrote, nobody could envision the most pernicious enemy of liberty the world has known; the globalist technocratic elite enabled by the ubiquity of the Internet. Fortunately, that same Internet is the Gutenberg press of the 21st century, and the elites will be no more successful in suppressing the truth than the Catholic Church was in suppressing the Reformation.

America’s Fight for Liberty
Most people would agree that true political and religious liberty was for the first time realized in the republic that is the United States of America. Yet, Mark David Hall answers the question of his book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? with a resounding yes! Christianity and liberty are perfectly compatible. In fact, liberty is impossible without it. Unfortunately, the 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 (becoming a NeverTrumper). 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 that 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. Which is why 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. Not to mention anti-sodomy laws. Doesn’t sound very magical or pluralistic to me!

America’s founders were Englishmen fighting for the rights of Englishmen, which is why someone like Patriot Patrick Henry uttered these immortal words during a speech to the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775:

What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Sadly, most Americans today have traded liberty for security. The English men and women who turned into Americans understood the true value of liberty, of self-government, because they knew their English history, which Americans have lamentably forgotten given the woeful state of so-called “public education.” The revolution was their fight for “the rights of Englishmen.” They knew about Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, The Puritans, Oliver Cromwell and his fight for religious tolerance, and the Glorious Revolution and its Bill of Rights. In fact, Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution. Americans as Englishmen saw their rights earned centuries before being blithely discarded by the British government.

Covid and Recapturing of Our Liberty
None of this was in the realm of abstract “rights” intellectual conservatives love to argue about. It was real, boots on the ground, everyday living as self-governing people before God who granted them the liberty to live their own lives. Americans were eminently practical people, including its intellectual leaders. Unfortunately, with the rise of progressivism starting in the early 20th century, most Americans slowly lost the genius of America as being a self-governing republic. Instead of taking care of ourselves as a self-governing people, we gave over that care to the Nanny State. The Covid debacle was an indication of just how far we’ve fallen. Too many Americans, sadly, proved to be sheeple instead of the independent citizens America used to produce. But Covid has turned out to be a blessing in disguise because God’s job is to turn evil into good and thwart the devil’s plans to destroy his creation.

I’ve always believed the greatness that is America still resides in most Americans to some degree, and the progressive globalist totalitarians cannot wipe it out completely. Once the Covid scam came to be seen as exactly that, a scam, Americans woke up. They realized that instead of blindly trusting “experts” they should trust themselves. Because of the Internet, the globalists can no longer control “the narrative,” and truth is winning. There is a Great Awakening on so many levels. I believe we can defeat America’s woke Maxrist enemies, and re-found America based on limited government as a self-governing people. We need to pray for this daily and trust God in his sovereign Almighty providence will make that happen through us.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: A Parable for Our Times

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: A Parable for Our Times

Nov 6, 2023 | Politics & Government

I don’t know how many years it’s been since I saw this classic 1939 movie starring Jimmy Stewart and directed by the great Frank Capra, so I didn’t realize how relevant it would be to 2023. And I mean spot on relevant. Those two, by the way, teamed up to make the also classic, It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946.

One thing before I get to my thoughts. It’s refreshing to watch a movie that doesn’t have gratuitous F words thrown around all over the place. In fact, the entire movie didn’t have one single vulgarity, and it didn’t affect the verisimilitude of it at all. Every new TV show and movie, unless it’s specifically a Christian production, has to have F this and F that all over this place. It’s banal now and tiring, and is ruining a perfectly good vulgarity by overuse. Now to Mr. Smith.

You might be surprised to learn the exact same dynamics we see playing out in 2023 politics has always been so. In fact, the more I learn the details of America’s founding era, the more I see nastiness is the nature of politics. There never has been nor will there ever be a golden age of politics. However, there have only been two periods, so far, where bloodshed was required to get political answers to intractable problems. The first was the Revolution where Englishmen engaged in a civil war to see whether political independence would be a reality for the American colonies. Once it did, keeping the states united in their independence was a struggle. It wasn’t at all obvious the United States of America would last. The next time our countrymen went to war against one another was the Civil War, the conflict caused by the great scourge on our country, slavery. There too it wasn’t at all obvious that the United States of America would last. We are now in third period of American history where America as we know it seems like it could easily fall apart. As it is often said, we live in a time of cold civil war.

The Nature of this War
In the book I just finished (I’m in the process of getting it published), I wrote a chapter on the re-founding of America. The republic as founded if not lost is slipping away, quickly. The current regime, junta really, has jettisoned the rule of law. Now, Democrat-leftist politics is law, the in-Justice Department and their military, the FBI, has created a police state. This weaponization of government—which only goes one way, left against right, Democrats against Republicans, Media-Industrial Complex against regular Americans—started back not long after 9/11 with the Patriot Act. Promoted by the Bush/Cheney administration, it passed the House that year 357 to 66, ironically the majority of the no votes coming from Democrats (62). It is important to understand what happened in this legislation:

  • The Patriot Act turned the intel surveillance radar from foreign searches for terrorists to domestic searches for terrorists.

What was allowed in other countries, i.e., spying on people, was now allowed on American soil, all in the name of catching terrorists, of course.

Then two things happened when Obama was elected president and took office in 2009. Remember he boasted five days before the election that his goal was “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” This began happening in two ways. First, leftist groupthink took over the Democrat Party and the corporate media. For the latter, all pretensions to objectivity went out the window. The media was now the cheerleader for all leftist-Democrat policies and politicians, and complicit in discrediting their opponents, Republicans and conservatives. All things leftist not only took over government, including the intelligence bureaucracy (CIA, DOJ, FBI, etc.), but the culture as well. The war against America, its fundamental transformation, was waged on two very effective fronts. The second relates specifically to the Patriot Act.

  • The Obama/Biden administration redefined what a “terrorist” is to include their political opposition.

This happened during his presidency, but we began to see the full pernicious power of this “deep state” before Trump even took office. Despite Republicans controlling both houses of congress, the wheels of injustice kept turning because Republicans hated Trump as much as Democrats (it’s called the Uniparty after all). If you want to take a deep dive about all this to see exactly what patriotic Americans are up against, I encourage you to read this detailed piece at The Conservative Treehouse on The Post 9/11 Weaponization of The U.S. Govt. It is sobering.

You’ll also want to watch this trailer, and eventually Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie called Police State. It’s almost unfathomable this can be happening in the United States of America, but alas, it is. The Marxists are in charge, and like all good Marxists they will do whatever it takes to keep and extend their power. Power is an aphrodisiac to some, and a responsibility to others. Mr. Smith understood it was the latter. The problem for the bad guys, however, is us, and the genius of the Founding Fathers of America. There is still enough of America left to save it all.

How We fight back-We the People . . . .
I encourage you to watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington if you haven’t seen it, and watch it again if you have. It’s almost da ja vu all over again. The people and the technology have changed, but it’s eerie how it mirrors our own day. It shows that there is real, substantive power in “We the people,” something never before given to a people in the history of the world. We just don’t take advantage of it. We the people are the first words in our Constitution and have changed the world in too many ways to count. Yet, what do we do? Complain. We’re terribly good at it too. We even delude ourselves into thinking that means we are doing something. It most certainly does not!

I must quote from an article written in The Atlantic in April 1877 by the twentieth president of the United State, James A. Garfield, then a member of the US House of Representatives. It is called “A Century of Congress,” and he reflects on the history of American government focusing on congress and its importance to a well-functioning republic. It could not be timelier or more apropos for our day because of the inherent fragility of this experiment of government of, by, and for the people (in Lincoln’s memorable phrase):

[N]ow, more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand those high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. . . . The most alarming feature of our situation is the fact that so many citizens of high character and solid judgment pay but little attention to the sources of political power, to the selection of those who shall make their laws. The clergy, the faculties of colleges, and many of the leading business men of the community never attend the township caucus, the city primaries, or the county convention; but they allow the less intelligent and the more selfish and corrupt members of the community to make the slates and “run the machine” of politics. They wait until the machine has done its work, and then, in surprise and horror at the ignorance and corruption in public office, sigh for the return of that mythical period called the “better and purer days of the republic.” It is precisely this neglect of the first steps in our political processes that has made possible the worst evils of our system.

Chalk this up to the more things change . . . . I like the way someone in our day, Eric Metaxas, puts the opportunity and danger inherent in the American system of government:

[B]y itself the Constitution could do very little. What it promised would require the efforts of all those who henceforth called themselves Americans. It was they who must keep it, the republic and the grand and noble promise of that republic. That is the wonderful, spectacular genius of it all, and the terrible, sobering danger of it all too. The document and the men who created it put these unimaginably great and fragile things in the hands of the people.

Notice very carefully what President Garfield concluded: “It is precisely this neglect of the first steps in our political processes that has made possible the worst evils of our system.” So if you want to know who to blame for what’s going on in Washington, DC right now, look in the mirror. We call this tough love.

What Can I Do?
Well, I’m glad you asked. I can’t explore in detail here what civic engagement will look like for each person. It will look different for each one of us depending on our talents, aspirations, age, commitments, resources, etc. As the Apostle Paul said, different parts of the body have different functions but they are all of value and necessary. But I will share a few thoughts.

For most of my life I’ve seen the key to changing our country happening from the top down; I was wrong. Many Americans agree with me, realizing nobody is coming to the rescue; that if our country is to be saved it is going to be up to us—we the people. Change has to happen in large part from the bottom up, at the local level. We’ve become fat, happy, and lazy believing if we just vote things will take care of themselves. Clearly they won’t. This is a challenge for those of us of a conservative bent like me who just want to live our lives, take care of our families, and enjoy God’s blessings. That is no longer an option. I know the 80/20 rule is a fact of life, that twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work and vice versa, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and we must encourage each other to get involved or lose the right to complain. But what if twenty percent of God fearing patriotic Americans actually got involved? We could turn the world upside down! 

Those inclined to run for public office can serve in local city government, or county, or even at the state level. This is a heavy commitment which is why we need to pray for God to raise up Godly men and women of integrity committed to America’s founding principles. Those not so inclined must hold accountable those who are. This takes time and often money. It means showing up, writing e-mails, and making calls. I started seeing the possibilities of this when I discovered Steve Bannon’s War Room. There are patriots all over the country who realize the desperate times in which we live, and Bannon offered me a window to see this happening. It’s one of the reasons after the 2020 election and J6 fiascos I turned from a pessimist into an optimist. Because of the genius of the Founding Fathers, even as far gone as America is now, there are still many legal, peaceful means to fight back and defeat America’s enemies. 

One thing my wife and I have done (which doesn’t require an extensive commitment) is become precinct committeemen in our local county GOP. On War Room in February of 2021, I learned about something called the Precinct Strategy on his show as a means for conservatives to take over the Republican Party. There are over 400,000 of these positions throughout the country, and at least half are empty. I learned we can take over the Republican Party from the RINOs, who are not committed to America as founded, by becoming voting members of the Party. Unlike the Democrat Party, the Republican Party was developed to be run from the ground up to truly reflect what America is as a self-governing representative republic. People can be involved a little or a lot or anywhere in between, but I’ve seen this make a difference at the ground level in various states. I always think about the 200,000 empty positions when I see people complain.

Anytime you are tempted to complain, think about Mr. Smith and the power of “We the people.” We have our own modern example of Mr. Smith and the power of “We the people.” That would be congressman Matt Gaetz. Almost single handedly he, along with five or so other congressmen he led, were able to get the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, deposed, a first in American history. He stood firm for three weeks while being pilloried by so-called conservatives and the left-liberal media. But as Steve Bannon often says, courage is contagious. And like “We the people” in the movie put pressure on their elected representatives, so did “We the people” on the real congress, and Mike Johnson was elected Speaker, an unashamed Christian who brings his Christian convictions and worldview boldly to his duties as Speaker. We, with lots of prayer, are our only hope.

A Rebel with a Cause, Matt Gaetz Delivers Righteous Remarks to Florida Freedom Summit on Saturday. Mr. Smith would be proud.