So let us start at the base of the stairs, and go up them one at a time.
Every society, of necessity, must have a final locus of authority. That authority must either be contingent and within the system, or absolute and outside the system.
If there is no absolute authority outside the system, then the contingent authority within the system has become functionally absolute. It is not and cannot be absolute, but it can try to act like it is.
In short, if there is no absolute above the state, then the state becomes absolute. In blunter terms, if there is no God over the state, then the state has been made god.
To acquiesce in this arrangement would be, to use the biblical term, idolatry.
It therefore follows that it is our duty and responsibility to confess the true God as the sovereign over all human society, and over every form of human society.
All societies are moral agents, and consequently make decisions that can be morally praised or condemned. All moral agents are answerable to the God who created them. It therefore follows that all societies have the responsibility to acknowledge the true God of Heaven because He is the one who will praise or condemn their actions at the last day.
To postulate a false god as occupying that place outside the system is to be guilty of a more subtle form of idolatry, but it is still idolatry—a construct of human devising, not truly outside the system, but rather projected there by human contrivance.
To make the principle obvious, let us stipulate a cargo cult somewhere that worships a Nike sneaker that washed up on their beach, treating the sneaker as an avatar of the transcendent Sneaker. It is a long shot example, but stranger things have happened. The fact that it is projected into the realm of the transcendent does not keep it from being idolatry.
This would be a “transcendent” idol, scare quotes included. Allah would be this sort of idol. Authorities within the system assuming the prerogatives of Deity are immanent idols. The only authority over all human affairs that is truly outside the system would be the true and living God. All Christians, in order to be Christians, must confess this.
All of this is self-evident, and yet many still draw back from openly acknowledging it. This is because of the next question, which will always be immediately posed. And, truth be told, it is a good question. It is a most reasonable question.
If there must be a God outside the system, lest the system itself become god by default, the natural question is then, “which God?” What is His name? This is where many political thinkers, otherwise clear headed, flinch. The answer has to be “the true God,” but to answer that way will result in them being called a Christian nationalist.
When they flinch like this, they believe they are pulling back from the prospect of horrendous religious wars and interminable conflict. They are actually setting the stage for such wars and conflicts because that is what every form of pacifism necessarily does. Appeasement does buy time, but then it makes up for that in blood later on.
If we reply, as we should, “the true and living God,” the follow up question is immediate. “And which one is that? Who is this true and living God? Does He have a name?”
Lest I keep you in suspense, the answer is the Christian God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. Jehovah, He is the Lord.
In a society made up of Christians, this would have to be our choice, of necessity. And it would exclude, also of necessity, Allah, Shiva the Destroyer, Molech, Mammon, and regulators from the EPA.
But because we have been taught not to “exclude” anyone from anything, lest we hurt feelings, this creates a different kind of pressure. This is the pressure to opt for a Lowest Common Denominator god, a placeholder god, a god whose attributes are best described as an extended and etiolated tapioca pudding, kept at an appropriate storage temperature in the celestial cooler.
This is the god now invoked on American coins, and over the last 75 years, he has shown us just how impotent he really is. He governs nothing, He reveals nothing, He rules nothing, and He judges nothing. In fact, he appears to have abdicated his position altogether, and has delegated any remaining ceremonial duties to that big marble statue of Zeus Sedet in the Lincoln Memorial.
This scratch n’ sniff god of the current iteration of classical liberalism couldn’t save sinners who were trapped in a wet paper bag, much less from the fires of Hell.
But back before our activist judges and our cotquean church history professors started memory-holing everything, the God of classical liberalism really was the true God, the God of a robust Christian consensus. But that was a long time ago now, a century or more.
The current classical liberal order has a god shelf, and every porcelain deity-figurine on it is an idol, contained within the Temple of Mammon, the one who actually collects all the tithes.
The older Christian consensus had a shelf also, but it was not a god shelf. It was a “lawful political order” shelf, and one of the most beautiful objects there was the classical liberal order, the way it used to be.
We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty, and property. Without a societal recognition of life, liberty, and property, a healthy classical liberal order cannot exist, and life, liberty, and property are no rights at all unless they were granted us by our Creator.
But under Darwin, there is no Creator. Under secularism, there is no Creator. Under atheistic materialism, there is no Creator. There are therefore no rights. And when sinful men see that such a denial of our Creator and Maker has been established in the assumptions of the populace, the first thought that occurs to them is “job opening.”
And when the state assumes this role, functioning as an immanent idol, they see no need to endow anybody with anything. They do dispense privileges, and they do offer bribes to their favorites, but rights? Never.
These observations are all obvious enough that they must either be refuted, embraced, or suppressed.
Professing Christians who are nervous about Christian nationalism will see their options begin to narrow. They cannot refute these observations, or at least to date have shown no inclination to try. They cannot embrace them for that will cause them emotional distress, a thing not to be borne. This will leave one option remaining, which is that of joining with the persecutors, and declaring the newly minted state church to be the one faithful representative of the “way of the Master.”
The more epistemologically self-conscious our unbelieving society becomes, the more they act out their foundational principles, the more clear and evident these observations will become. To any Christian who is thinking clearly and biblically, the surrounding cultural apostasy will make it plain that these observations cannot be refuted, and no one is trying to, and that the persecutors must therefore try to suppress them, which is what they are doing. The only honest Christian alternative therefore will be to embrace them.