About

Pietas publica is an old name for public piety: a people’s duty toward God in common life. It is not a private hobby. It is not a party platform.

Pietas Publica is a house for ordered thought under Christ — notes and essays on Christian nationalism and the public square, and also on philosophy, theology, and exegesis. One series on this site is Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square, under the line Ordered Liberty under Christ. That series keeps an ordinary and old claim: Christ is Lord of the nations; nations are real; the magistrate is under God; the public square is never morally neutral. Patriotism names the ordered love of a people and a place. Christian nationalism, in the use those essays keep, names the claim. Other pieces will not always wear that series title. They still belong under the same Lord.

The numbered essays in that series are:

  1. Christian Nationalism vs. Christian Patriotism
  2. What Fascism Actually Is (and Isn’t)
  3. “America Was Never a Christian Nation”
  4. Particular Peoples, Ordered Loves, and the Charge of Kinism
  5. The Myth of Neutrality
  6. When the State Co-opts Religion

The basic premise of these essays is that the church has the keys and the magistrate has the sword. Both are under Christ. Disagreement about how that is ordered is not heresy unless it denies the creeds.

The writing is Reformed. Scripture and the Westminster standards are the ordinary grammar. These pages are not sermons, and they are not a campaign. America is not the church. Christ is still Lord of the nations.

Flavius Iustinus writes them. He studied philosophy. He is not the argument. He writes as a Christian who thinks the magistrate still has to give an account, and that the church still has to preach Christ crucified without becoming a department of civic religion.