Introduction
So the other day Kevin DeYoung posted this article entitled 6 Questions for Christian Nationalists, and I was quite pleased about it. The pleasure was derived from the fact that I believe Kevin is clearly in a good place, and poised to be in a better place, and I believe real conversations between people of good will can only help everybody with everything.
Now his article was kind of a beast, and so it would be possible to launch any number of side quests while answering him, but I am going to restrain myself. I am simply going to limit myself to the six questions he referred to in his title.
My Brief Answers
In my answers, I want to follow the basic structure of his article. He asks the questions in brief first, and then he expands on those same questions. I am going to attempt the same thing. Brief answers first, and then to become a bit more fulsome in the second round.
Do you unequivocally renounce antisemitism, racism, and Nazism?
Yes, I do—and I was most grateful that Kevin acknowledged in his article that this is something I have been careful to do over the course of many years. The one important caveat that I would attach to this is that “antisemitism, racism, and Nazism” need to be defined in a biblical fashion, and not as the all-purpose slur that the left routinely deploys against anyone who stands in their way. But the fact that these terms have been emptied of their usefulness by the left does not mean that there is no bad behavior that now needs a new name. There is a thing there which Scripture condemns, and which I condemn also.
When and how does the nation act as a corporate moral person?
I would want to say moral agent instead of person, but nations are moral agents in that they can break promises, violate treaties, conduct genocides, build temples to false gods, enslave innocents, launch ungodly wars, dismember the unborn, grind the people with oppressive taxation, and do all such things by means of “framing mischief with a law” (Ps. 94:20). It is not for nothing that Jesus speaks of cities coming to the day of judgment. Chorazin, Bethsaida, Tyre, Sidon, Capernaum, Sodom . . . all moral agents (Matt. 11:21-23). And America is a moral agent too, a moral agent that is under the wrath of God.
What is the purpose of civil government?
Civil government is charged with rewarding the righteous and punishing the wrongdoer, with those moral terms being defined in line with the standards of the living God. To do this most effectively, the magistrate needs to promote the true religion in all wisdom. When the magistrate does this properly, it will establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for us and our children. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: But when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn” (Prov. 29:2).
What does it mean for the civil magistrate to promote true religion?
Fundamentally it means that the magistrate must recognize that all human laws need to have a transcendent grounding, anchored in the will of the true God. It does not necessitate the hard establishment of a state church. It does mean that the civil magistrate should formally recognize that Jesus rose from the dead. Having done so, he needs to have wisdom enough to identify the churches of our common Lord, recognize and honor their tax immunity, protect their liberty to worship God according to their understanding of Scripture, and guard their right to preach and proselytize in any way consistent with public order. It does not mean treating all religions as though they were Christian denominations.
Was the First Amendment a mistake?
No, the First Amendment was judicious and wise. The separation of church and state is a biblical doctrine, but this should never be confused with a separation of morality and state, which is an absurdity not to be borne.
What is the historical example of the political order you would like to see in America?
I would be content to return to the America my grandfather was born in, which was in 1899. I am referring to the immediate aftermath of the Holy Trinity decision of the Supreme Court in 1892. Now as a postmillennialist, I believe we would still have a long way to go from that point, but we could make our way there through slow organic development, and without veering off into the great civic apostasy that followed the Second World War.
Discuss Among Yourselves
Judging from my Twitter feed, different kinds of people are being appalled by the Nazis, the Nazi adjacent, the honkies, the Jew-haters, and Nick Fuentes’ army of bots from the subcontinent of India. Some of those being appalled are appalled by the sinfulness of such behavior, and because they don’t like seeing people caper about in unrighteousness. Let’s call them decent Christian critics. I am sympathetic with them. But a bunch of those being appalled are actually delighted with the opportunity to be appalled because it gives them a plausible reason to pursue their long-held strategy of establishing a deracinated America, and castigating anyone who opposes this with “antisemitism, racism, and Nazism.”
When I am asked (by someone like Kevin) to denounce such things, my strategy is to say, “Sure thing. Just remember that in order to be sins, they must be defined biblically.” But there are good people over here on my side of the line who have a different strategy. They say something like, “No—not until you define what you mean by those terms.” Given the times, both strategies are acceptable.
And it should be fair game, should it not, to ask Kevin to denounce, in unequivocal terms, all Christians who voted for Obama, Biden, or Harris, or who ever attended a BLM rally, or who closed their church for a year during COVID? The reason that should be fair game is because the people doing such things are every bit as disobedient as the Jew-haters. If we go by adjacent cooties, Neil Shenvi is compromised in exactly the same way that Stephen Wolfe is. Right?
As delighted as I was to see Kevin’s familiarity with Dabney, and his fearlessness in quoting him, I do have to differ with Dabney. Fire falls from heaven on cities. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, under judgment because of the wickedness of her rulers. The day of judgment is going to see a divine evaluation of how we all behaved in our corporate capacities. It is true that God will spare the righteous in what He does—Lot was removed from Sodom, Noah was given the ark, the land of Goshen was spared. Of course the judgment includes individual judgment, but it is by no means limited to that. If a giant meteor landed in the middle of the United States, destroying our nation, it would not be a random catastrophe. It would be something we in our collective capacity deserved.
The civil government is established by God, and has been ordained to function as His deacon, His servant. Now servants answer to their master, and God has instructed kings and princes to kiss the Son . . . lest He be angry (Ps. 2: 12). Now God plainly tells these magistrates that their duty is to reward the righteous and to punish the wrongdoer (Rom. 13: 3-4). The magistrate was not given leave to set up shop as the authority over what is righteous and what is not. Officials do not get to define what goodness is. Once we let them do that, they start dismembering the unborn, transing kids, and sanctifying sodomy. So autonomous secularism is rebellion. Pretended neutrality is rebellion. The purpose of civil government, therefore, is to govern the people with a view to their earthly and heavenly good, under the law of Christ.
In order to do this effectively in a biblical fashion, it is not necessary for the state to try to become the church, or to adopt the church as a department of the state. It is necessary, however, to operate within a robust Christian consensus. Every society has some form of establishment—there will be a dominant worldview. Without a dominant worldview, you do not have a society at all, just a gaggle of people. If you were to do a sweep of all the people in the Amsterdam airport and made them stand together on the tarmac, you would not have society. But if they had to live together, they could only do this if they had certain shared values, and all such values arise out of a worldview. You cannot have shared values without a shared worldview. In most secular societies today, that shared secular worldview runs in the background. Most do not recognize how its authority functions, or how it shapes the consensus. But it does shape the consensus. I object to a shared consensus built on the foundation of Darwin, and would prefer that it be built on the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. So what I am after is a soft establishment of the Christian faith, where there is a shared Christian consensus, but no overt financial or formal support of one Christian denomination over the others. Non-Christian religions would be treated with equity, but their foundational assumptions would be excluded by law from the foundations of the law.
The First Amendment prohibited the establishment of a state church at the federal level. Congress was prohibited from establishing a Church of the United States. That was a wonderful thing that they did. But when they did it, this did not exclude hard establishments at the state level, not at all. It did not exclude religious oaths as a requirement for office holders at the state level, not at all. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire all ratified the Constitution with an official denomination established in their state. Now I don’t believe state-level denominations are a good idea either, but they are certainly not an unconstitutional idea. Vermont came into the Union as the fourteenth state with an established state church. An originalist understanding of the First Amendment sees that the United States cannot have a hard establishment. But there is no prohibition of a soft establishment—a Christian consensus that is recognized as such by the executive, legislative and judicial parts of our national government.
Someone might ask, is that really necessary? I was ask them in reply, “What is a woman?” These things we are saying sounded really radical twenty years ago. But now, now that it has become apparent that secularism has lost all its mojo, and cannot tell you what a human being is, and therefore cannot tell you what human rights are, it is reasonable for people to look for alternatives. We are saying that the Christian consensus that governed America for three hundred years should be considered as a reasonable option. But whenever a million Hindus immigrate, it becomes less of an option. When a million Muslims arrive, it becomes less of an option. Hey! Maybe that was the point.
I simply want to return to the America I grew up in, but with that America no longer running on cruise control. There were Christian assumptions everywhere back then, but nobody knew what they were, or how to defend them. Our civic apologists failed. The secularists then told us that these were universal human values, and we bought the lie, but that turned out to be a lie. Radically different worldviews generate radically different ethical systems. These ethical systems are inconsistent with one another, as we are starting to see.
Let me put this another way. If you want a return to “traditional American values,” you will need to deal with Jesus first. If you don’t want to deal with Jesus first, then you can toss your traditional American values back into the whistling wind.