Since I recently wrote on Christian Nationalism, I need to address a criticism some Christians have of the concept: hypocritical Christians.
This criticism comes mostly from thoughtful Baptists who are consistent with their theological presuppositions and worry that in a Christian nation many or most people who profess Christianity won’t really be born-again, regenerate Christians. That is undoubtably true, and that concern is what I will address in this post. I will argue that is irrelevant to the concept of a Christian nation, and in fact a good thing, thus the title of this post.
We have no way of knowing who the true Christians among the populations of Christian nations of the past were, nor do we know that today. I make it a habit not to presume upon the state of someone’s soul or relationship to the Living God, unless they make it absolutely clear what state that is. I trust those who claim the name of Jesus that they are sincere, even if I disagree with their theology, or even if their life doesn’t reflect it to the degree I think it should. I leave the souls of the non-Christians up to God to deal with as he sees fit. As Hebrews says, “Just as man is appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment,” (Heb. 9:27), so I leave the judging to God.
When I started thinking about writing Going Back to Find the Way Forward in early 2022, I 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. What I’ve learned in the last two plus years is the way I think it does work, and more on that to follow.
The Confusion of the Church and the Kingdom
One of the reasons Christians are confused about this, as I was for most of my Christian life, is that I conflated the church and the kingdom of God. To me the church was the kingdom and the kingdom was the church. Anything or anyone outside of the church was not part of God’s kingdom, and it was only where the church or Christians were that made a place God’s kingdom. This is certainly a reflection of Baptist theology which is pretty much ubiquitous in modern Evangelicalism. I didn’t realize as a Presbyterian I had categories to see such a perspective as distorted and unbiblical. Of course Baptists will disagree with me on that.
What’s the difference between the two theological perspectives that merges kingdom and church or doesn’t? For me it was embracing postmillennialism that caused me to realize why as a Presbyterian I should see the church and the kingdom as two distinct and separate, though interrelated entities. The church is the main driver of advancing the kingdom of God in the world, and the kingdom lived out in the life of the church is brought outside of the walls of the church by faithful Christians applying God’s law and word and the gospel to every square inch of life. In the words of Jesus, we are salt and light in a fallen world, and Jesus used such metaphors because what we do in the world matters, as salt we really do enhance flavor and preserve, and as light we really do make darkness flee. In other words, as disciples of King Jesus, what we do actually changes things, pushes back the effects of the fall, and advances God’s kingdom.
First let’s address Baptist theology. For most of the history of the church until the Reformation, all Christians were baptized as infants because Christians were part of the national community of Christians. In Christendom 1.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, church and state were conflated, so in effect the church was the state and the state was the church. Baptism was what introduced you as a community member and citizen. If you were not baptized you were not part of the Church or the community, and thus not part of the nation, not a citizen. This all changed with what’s come to be known as the Radical Reformation, and the introduction into Christendom of the Anabaptists. This was very early in the Reformation, and Anabaptists refused to baptize babies, an extremely unpopular sentiment in those days, and many paid for it with their lives. The reason it was perceived as so dangerous and capital punishment was seen as a reasonable response, was because it threatened the essential order of a society. Religion wasn’t a personal and individual thing in the Middle Ages, but a family and community and societal thing, something that encompassed every area of life.
As you can imagine in such societies, there were a lot of hypocritical Christians, or what I’ve heard some call them, nominal Christians, or Christian in name only. That is undoubtably true, and yet all these people considered themselves living in a Christian nation and culture. This also highlights the concept of the visible and invisible church coming out of the Reformation. Not every baptized member of a church is in fact a born-again Christian, as Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt. 7:21) This applies to Baptists who don’t baptize infants, and Presbyterians who do, but also for that matter Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutherans. Just because someone is baptized and belongs to a church, doesn’t mean their profession of faith is real. God will determine that at the end of time.
Hypocrisy is a Fact of Life: The Only Question is Which Hypocrisy
Do you ever wonder how many woke hypocrites there are? That may sound like an odd question, but think about it. Contrary to the First Amendment, the established religion of America is secularism, and woke, a form of cultural Marxism we’re all too familiar with now, is the most powerful denomination. Few people, though, are secular progressive absolutist woke leftists, yet the woke have no problem imposing their views and policies on an unwilling society. As Christopher Caldwell documents in The Age of Entitlement, because of the Civil Rights Act and other laws passed during 60s, the leftist agenda has been pushed on an unwilling populace from the top down. All the so called “rights” regarding race and sexual perversion were never embraced or welcomed by the vast majority of Americans, until the courts shoved it all down their throats. The examples are legion, and I encourage every American who wants to get our country back to read that book, what I now consider probably the most important book of the 21st century.
Let’s establish one indisputable fact: every human being is a hypocrite. We are all sinners and thus imperfect. That means we can’t live up to our own standards, let alone those of a holy God. We say and believe things, and often act contrary to what we believe. This is just as true for secular people who claim not to be religious, although they too live by faith. They have certain values and beliefs and can’t live up to those all the time either. Just ask one if they are perfect, and they will instantly say no, which means they are hypocrites too.
The greatest illusion in the age of secularism is the myth of neutrality. Because all people live by faith and are thus religious, and because societies are made up of religious people, all of a society’s laws and values are a reflection of their religious faith. Culture is simply religion externalized. There is no morally or religiously neutral nation. The question must always be asked about a nation’s laws: by what standard? Where do a nation’s laws and standards, what is embraced and what is stigmatized, considered right and wrong, come from? Ultimately, there are only two choices, God or man, revelation or reason.
Many scholars and historians seem to miss a very basic fact about America’s founding, that America was founded as a Christian nations. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration about a Creator, about nature and nature’s God, he and every person who read it knew this Creator and God was the God of the Bible, of Genesis to Revelation. There was not one secularist among the founding generation, and none were doctrinaire Deists. All of America’s founders were Englishmen until they became Americans, and they were fighting for the rights of Englishmen that came down to them from King Alfred the Great in the 9th century, to Magna Carter in 1215, and through the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Every one of those 900 years was bathed in Christianity with God’s law as the foundation of the development of English common law and the rights afforded to citizens because of it.
America was founded as a Protestant Christian nation, and it will only be re-founded to the degree that Christianity again becomes the dominant religious foundation of the nation. As Doug Wilson says, it is either Christ or chaos. Too many conservatives and Christians buy into the myth of neutrality, and that secular pluralism in some kind of classical liberalism is the answer to the current chaos of Marxist wokeness. If you start talking about God’s law, the Bible and Christianity, and God forbid, Christian nationalism, they all start warning everyone against the horror of theocracy, as if the meaning of that word is self-evident. It is not. But yes, God must rule our nation because only if He does, will we regain the liberty our founders fought and died for. Otherwise with secularism, we have tyranny and the will to power, the bitter taste of what America is experiencing now.
Culture, Plausibility Structures, Law, and Faith, and the Disaster of Pietism
A movement in Germany in the 16h century arose to purify the German Lutheran church which came to be called Pietism. In due course it leaked out and infected all forms of Protestant Christianity, especially through the efforts and ministry of John Wesley. The Second Great Awakening in the 19th century was primarily a Pietistic awakening, which in due course turned conservative Bible believing Christianity primarily into a form of fundamentalism. When I was a young Christian in the late 70s and 80s, I learned about Evangelical Christians who I differentiated from the fundamentalists. The former were more culturally engaged and intellectually oriented, while the latter were not. I considered myself an Evangelical because of the influence of Francis Schaeffer very early in my faith journey. Today, however, there is no distinction and few if any embrace what has become post-9/11 a pejorative term, fundamentalism. All conservative protestants are now Evangelicals.
Why do I say that Pietism is a disaster? Because it turned Christian faith inward, making it primarily personal and not societal. Wesley and Pietistic Christians until the raise of fundamentalism very much believed their faith should affect the morals of society, but that was the problem—it was moralistic. Christianity for them was primarily about ethics, right and wrong, doing good verses doing bad, rather than metaphysics, or Christian worldview. Here is a good definition of this term:
The branch of philosophy which studies fundamental principles intended to describe or explain all that is, and which are not themselves explained by anything more fundamental; the study of first principles.
For 1500 years until the rise of Pietism, all Christians saw their faith as totalizing, as an encompassing authority and standard of every area of life, both personal and societal. Pietism was a monumental change in perspective that slowly but completely took over Protestant Christianity, making it increasingly irrelevant to anything more than the Christian’s personal faith journey. The advocates of the Enlightenment, the other side of the Pietistic coin, were all too happy to see Christianity retreat from societal influence, and in due course Christian Western civilization ceased to exist. Now we have woke Western civilization.
This means the culture, plausibility structures, and the law, are all dominated and driven by the secular religion of the Marxist woke faith. On a practical level we live in societies where the social conditions of are no longer conducive to belief in God and Christianity, but in the secular alternatives. Aaron Ren calls this negative world. Up until the 1980s Christianity was seen as a positive good for society. Then as secularism came to dominant the culture, Christianity became something neutral, neither good nor bad, but as the 21st century turned into its second decade, we now live in negative world where Christianity is seen by cultural elites as positively dangerous and regressive. Witness the secular pagan left going nuts over Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker affirming motherhood and the traditional conception of the family. If some famous football player had said the same things in 1995 when he was born, in neutral world, nobody would have noticed.
The mission for Christians and the church in the 21st century, then, is to re-Christianize the culture and build the plausibility structures that makes Christianity plausible to more people, which leads to the growth of the church (more people saved) and the advance of God’s kingdom. We want the social conditions to be conducive to belief in God and Christianity, and that means we reject Pietism and a merely personal faith. On a practical level, per Jesus’ instructions in the Great Commission, our job is to disciple our nation, and teach it and all the people in it, everything Jesus commanded us. In due course as the culture shifts in our direction, that will mean more hypocritical or nominal Christians, which is exactly what we should want. The alternative is the hypocritical woke Marxists we live with now. As Jesus said about the poor, the hypocrites we will always have among us. The question is which kind of hypocrites do we prefer.
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