Christian Nationalism is not an historical oddity. It’s been the historical norm for most of church history for most of the church. A nation that thinks it can be areligious, that thinks it can divorce religion from culture and politics, is the historical oddity. Secularism is the historical oddity. An atheistic public square has never worked. Atheism provides no moral content for a nation, no standards for the culture, no values for people to live by. The only atheistic societies that have ever existed are Marxist. Western nations that have gone secular are not *really* secular or atheist; they still rely on aspects of their religious (Christian) heritage in at least some aspects of public life, and rely on the religion of secular humanism for others (and yes, secularism is indeed a religion). The so-called “culture wars” are over precisely this issue: will Western nations reclaim the Christian heritage that built their civilization or will they go after other gods? The “culture war” not about raw power; for Christians, it is about the Great Commission. It’s about recognizing the reality that Jesus is, in fact, Lord.
There is nothing more normal, historically speaking, than for Christians to advocate for the Christianization of their nation’s public life. It was the norm in the West for generations and generations. The Christian story defined Western civilization. Christian symbols dominated art, architecture, etc. God’s law, however imperfectly applied, was the moral norm.
Christians today who reject any form of Christian Nationalism (which, admittedly, has a variety of definitions) need to explain why they believe the public square *ought* to remain religiously neutral. Where does the Bible command that? Where does the obligation to keep religion out of the public square come from? Where is this teaching found? Not in the OT, where the king was commanded to keep his own copy of Torah and live by it; in the OT even Gentile kings are called upon to pay homage to God’s Messiah and God’s reign. Look at the king of Nineveh who led his whole city in repenting to YHWH, or Darius who called on his entire empire to fear Daniel’s God. Nor is it in the NT where Paul wanted nothing more than to preach the gospel to kings and the apostles declared Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords. When Jesus said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render unto God what is God’s,” he was not setting up a secular/sacred dichotomy. Even if Caesar’s coin can be paid to Caesar because it bears Cesar’s image, Caesar himself bear God’s image and must render himself and his God-ordained office to God. Jesus was not saying Caesar is exempted from serving God. Why did Paul explain the God-ordained function of civil magistrates in Romans 13 when there no Christian magistrates in the entire world at that time? Precisely because he expected that someday many magistrates would be converted; and when that happened, he knew a Christian magistrate would desire to wield his sword Christianly. Paul was laying the groundwork for Christendom, even if it was a few generations off. Christendom may have only been a dream a time, a glint is Paul’s eye, but he knew it was coming and he was preparing for it. “Hey, just in case you ever get an emperor in Rome who desires to know what God wants him to do, I’ll throw in some instructions in my letter to the church at Rome. That way when the ruler of the Roman Empire becomes a church member, he can understand what his role is. He should bless and protect the righteous – the church – and he should be a terror to evil doers. He should understand he bears the sword to avenge God’s wrath against wickedness, and he should understand that he is God’s deacon.” Unless Paul believed in and expected the conversion of nations as such, including their rulers, there is no reason for him to tell magistrates what to do in a letter addressed to the church.
Christian faith has always been personal, but never private. The Great Commission is all about baptizing nations – making them Christian nations – and teaching the nations all that Jesus commanded (which includes the OT) so they can live Christianly in all aspects of life and culture. The Great Commission requires both personal conversion in the private lives of individuals and national conversion in the public life of a people. It is comprehensive. That’s why the Great Commission is premised upon Jesus’ possession of ALL authority in heaven and earth. Jesus is king over creation and culture; he is commissioning his church to go claim for him what is rightfully his.
Some form of Christian Nationalism can be found in Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers, the Reformed confessions, the Puritans who colonized America, etc. That’s not to say they got everything right. It is to say they understood that the Christian faith cannot be confined to the four walls of the church; by design, it must eventually spill over into public life. Again, Christian Nationalism is just historic Christianity. It should not scare us; its rejection, on the other hand, is very scary.
Progressives who use the “Christian Nationalism” label as a smear are running a play that secularists has successfully used against Christian influence in recent years. Progressives have no problem imposing their own humanistic secular views on the public square. They use the “Christian Nationalism” label in an attempt to keep Christians from trying to influence society at large in a Christian way. “My progressive values are allowed in the public square; your Christian values are not.” It’s their latest strategy to minimize Christian involvement in culture, to make Christians think they have to surrender, to dupe Christians into falling for the myth of neutrality, to privilege their own secular belief system. It’s their way of marginalizing the role of the church and the Bible in the public life of the nation. They put up “no trespassing” signs around public life so Christians will think they have to check their religious faith at the door when they enter into and engage in public life.
When progressives try to use “separation of church and state” as way of protecting publicly established secularism, they are doing the same thing. Church and state are distinct spheres with their own officers and roles; but the state is not and never can be areligious. I will grant the progressive strategy been highly successful which is why our culture is so degenerate today. But these strategies only work because Christians have been poorly catechized and accept a privatized, truncated gospel. They only work if Christians fall for the lie of neutrality and implicitly deny the comprehensive lordship of Jesus.
Those who argue Christian nations are an impossibility are not only ignorant of history, they are not consistent. I know of no one who denies there can be Islamic nations. Again, everyone except for modern Westerners knows (and has always known) that public and political life are intrinsically religious. Any G/god worthy of the name claims public space. The ancient Israelites did not have a word for “religion” (as Rushdoony pointed out) because religion was enmeshed in everything. It could not be separated out from any area of life. That’s the worldview Christians inherited; the Christian is not a private religious experience but a totalizing way of life. Christians would never have been persecuted by the Roman Empire if their faith was entirely private. They were persecuted because they announced a new cosmic king that even Caesar must bow before. Jesus is lord over everything – every square inch of creation belongs to him. To ignore or deny his reign in any area of life is to sin against him. Christian Nationalism is just a way of recognizing reality – that Jesus really is Lord.
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Religious faith and politics cannot be mixed. You can only mix them if they are initially separated – and they are not separated, or separable, ever. Politics, like culture as a whole, is always already religious. All law is legislated morality, and morality has a religious basis. That religion may be secular humanism, which makes man the measure of all things. That religion may be Islam, resulting in Sharia law. Or that religion may be the gospel of Jesus Christ. But every society has a religious foundation, and all politics is the expression of those foundational religious commitments in the public square.
Secular humanism disguises its religiosity under the guise of neutrality but this is naive and/or dishonest. It is most certainly a religion. Neutrality is a myth. Secular humanism is a rival to Christian faith. If one wins, the other loses. It’s that simple.
Christian faith built Western civilization, including America. Without the load-bearing wall of orthodox Christian faith, our nation collapses. This is why many of us believe the only hope for America is found in repentance and righteousness, as defined by God’s Word. America must repent or perish (as Tucker Carlson reminded us last Sunday).
This is also why the expression of religious faith at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service was so important. It was explicitly Christian unlike anything in living memory. Just compare Kirk’s memorial, with its open declarations of Christ’s lordship, to the post 9/11 memorial in 2001, when our leaders sat under a female Episcopalian priestess and heard speeches from imams and rabbis. It was a pluralistic, idolatrous, damnable mess. We were inviting God’s judgment with that service, a judgement only staved off by the Lord’s patience with us.
While America still does not have the Christian substance we need to sustain our constitutional republic, hearing so many of our civil leaders openly proclaim the lordship of Christ was a firm step in the right direction.
The problem is that our nation is deeply divided – not primarily politically, but religiously. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and we are very much divided right now. On the one hand, we have the religion of progressivism – a form of secular humanism tinged with Marxism’s oppressor/victim dynamic. On the other hand, we have traditional Christian faith, which was on display in much of the Kirk memorial (though obviously, not all the speakers were orthodox Christians). Our political and cultural wars feel ultimate because they are – they are really religious wars. The culture wars are over; the wars of religion are now firmly underway.
Traditionally, Americans have thought of politics as the art of compromise. That worked ok at times, mainly because the two sides were reasonably close and shared a broad worldview. Both sides worked within a shared framework for much of our history. That is no longer the case. The two sides are rapidly becoming mirror images of one another, so that what one side calls love, the other side calls hate, and vice versa. The transgender issue and abortion issue could be exhibits A and B of this phenomenon, but there are now countless examples. Politics as usual no longer works.
The story of America has entered a pivotal chapter. We can descend further into darkness than we already have or we can move towards the Light of the World. We can be one more once great Western nation that falls into utter apostasy or we can reclaim the faith and practices that built a once glorious civilization. Echoing the words of Joshua to Israel, “Choose this day whom you will serve, America, either the gods of humanism, secularism, and Marxism, or Allah, or the Lord Jesus Christ.” I pray America makes the right choice.
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