Christian Nationalism vs. Christian Patriotism

Essay I of Christ, the Nations, and the Public Square

Some Christians want the substance and not the name. Call it patriotism. Call it conservatism. Call it “a Christian view of the magistrate.” Leave “nationalism” to the people who will abuse it, and to the people who will use it as a slur. That is a chess move. I understand it. I am not going to play it.

Patriotism names an affection: ordered love of a people and a place. That love is real, and Scripture requires something like it. Christian nationalism names a claim: that Christ is Lord of the nations, that nations are real, that the magistrate is under God, and that the public square is never morally neutral. The affection without the claim will be praised at banquets and ignored in legislation. The claim without the affection will curdle into ideology. We need both. We will not surrender the name of the claim because the worst men have touched it, or because the laziest critics have decided that any public Christianity is a threat to democracy.

What Scripture will not let us deny

The risen Christ does not share the world with rival lords. “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth” (Matt 28:18). The Great Commission is not a private hobby. It is the announcement that the nations already belong to the Son. Psalm 2 is not a metaphor for inner peace. The nations rage. Kings take their stand. The One enthroned in heaven laughs, and then he speaks:

So now, kings, be wise; receive instruction, you judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with reverential awe and rejoice with trembling. Pay homage to the Son or he will be angry and you will perish in your rebellion, for his anger may ignite at any moment. All who take refuge in him are happy. (Ps 2:10–12)

That is not a call for the church to seize the sword. It is a call for the sword to remember who gave it. “Let everyone submit to the governing authorities, since there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are instituted by God” (Rom 13:1). The magistrate is “God’s servant, an avenger that brings wrath on the one who does wrong” (Rom 13:4). He is under God. He is not God. He does not carry the keys of the kingdom. He does carry the sword, and he will answer for how he used it.

Nations are not accidents. “From one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live” (Acts 17:26). Particular peoples, particular places, particular times: these are providence, not paganism. The same verse that blesses nationality begins with one man, so that no people may boast of blood as if it were election. Isaiah’s promise that “kings will be your guardians and their queens your nursing mothers” (Isa 49:23) is not a warrant for a state church that baptizes by force. It is a picture of public power bent toward the good of God’s people rather than set against them.

None of this is a modern culture-war invention. It is ordinary Christian confession. The Westminster Confession says that God, “the supreme Lord and king of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates to be under Him over the people, for His own glory and the public good,” and has armed them with the sword (WCF 23.1). The church’s government is “distinct from the civil magistrate” (WCF 30.1). The visible church is “not confined to one nation, as before under the law” (WCF 25.2). The Mosaic judicials expired with that commonwealth, “not obliging any other, now, further than the general equity thereof may require” (WCF 19.4). And “God alone is Lord of the conscience” (WCF 20.2).

Two kingdoms, then: not two lords. The church has the Word and the keys. The magistrate has the sword and the care of public justice. Both are under Christ. Calvin did not invent Jefferson. He was not teaching modern church-state separation. To read the Reformers as if they were modern separationists is to misread them. To read them as if they licensed forced conversions, racial ranking, or a church that is merely the chaplain of the state is to misread them the other way.

If that cluster of claims needs a name in this generation, the honest name is Christian nationalism. Not because the nation is the church. Because the nation, like every other creaturely order, is under Christ.

Patriotism is not enough

Love has an order. Augustine saw it. Scripture assumes it. “If anyone does not provide for his own family, especially for his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8). The household is not the highest good. Christ is. But a man who will not feed his children has not become more spiritual. He has become worse than an unbeliever.

The same grammar applies, analogically, to people and place. You may not love your country as God. You must not love it instead of the church catholic, or against the stranger to whom the law of God still binds you. You also may not pretend that gratitude for a particular inheritance is a sin. Jeremiah told exiles to seek the peace of the city where God had sent them (Jer 29:7). Paul used his Roman citizenship without apology (Acts 22:25–29). The fifth commandment is about parents, not nations. The analogical shape still holds: ordered love begins with what is given. Honoring father and mother may include honoring the givenness of a people, a language, a land, a law, so long as none of those things is made into an idol.

Call that Christian patriotism if you like. It is an ordered love. It gives thanks. It tells the truth about a nation’s sins, because love that will not tell the truth is flattery. It prays for magistrates (1 Tim 2:1–2). It pays what is owed (Rom 13:7). It refuses to call evil good because it is “ours,” and refuses to call good evil because it is “theirs.”

It is also, by itself, too small. A man can love his country and still believe the magistrate must pretend that good and evil are private tastes. He can put his hand over his heart and still think Christ has no business with statutes. Patriotism will get you to the parade. It will not settle whether the law of the land may still know the moral law of God. Christian nationalism is the name of that further claim: that a people may, without becoming a church and without baptizing at sword-point, order their common life toward Christ the King.

Three uses of the name, and which one we mean

The trouble is that “Christian nationalism” is now a slogan as well as a term. Charity requires us to say which use we mean, and then to keep the right one.

First, it is used as a smear. In that use, any Christian who thinks murder should be illegal, or that marriage is a creational ordinance, has become a “nationalist.” The aim is not definition. The aim is to make public Christianity sound like a costume for tyranny. A smear is not an argument. We should not flee the name in order to be thought decent. That is how slurs work. They make you do their editing for them.

Second, it names a real error. There is a way of loving a people that treats blood as covenant, or the nation as church, or the magistrate as a fourth member of the Trinity. There is a way of reading Acts 17:26 that forgets “from one man.” There is a way of wanting “Christian order” that means forced conversion, or second-class status for those who will not confess. Those are errors, and they are not the claim this essay is defending. Our opponents will try to make them the whole of the name, so that anyone who still believes Psalm 2 has to spend the rest of the argument apologizing. We will not do that. The abuse of a name is not a reason to hand the name over.

Third, it names what older Protestants simply assumed: that a Christian people may seek Christian magistrates, Christian laws in their civil use, and a public life that does not pretend Christ is a private mascot. Nations cannot be baptized. Persons are. A people can, over time, be deeply marked by the faith, and their laws can either honor or insult the God who ordained the magistrate. The American revision of Westminster (1788) already drew a hard line against the magistrate administering Word, sacraments, or the keys, and against his interfering in matters of faith. It still called him, in Isaiah’s language, a nursing father, bound to protect the church without preferring one denomination, and bound to protect “the person and good name of all their people,” so that no one, “upon pretense of religion or of infidelity,” may injure another (WCF 23.3). That is not theocracy as coercion. It is not the myth of a naked public square either. That is the use we mean, and that is the use we will keep.

Disagreement about political theology is not heresy unless it denies the gospel. A brother who loves his country and fears the word “nationalism” is not therefore an enemy. He may be reacting to the second use. He may be playing chess. We can be patient with him. We will not pretend that his preferred vocabulary is more biblical than Psalm 2.

What we keep, and what we refuse

Keep this: Christ is Lord of every sphere. Nations are real. The magistrate is under God. Liberty of conscience is a Christian claim before it is a liberal one. The public square is never morally neutral. Law will catechize someone. The only question is who.

Refuse this: forced conversions. Worship of nation, money, or politician. The blending of church and state so that the pulpit becomes a precinct and the sword becomes a sacrament. Any ranking of peoples that treats the blood of Japheth, Shem, or Ham as a proxy for grace. The cheap trick of calling every moral law “fascism,” and the cheaper trick of borrowing actual fascist habits (the cult of the leader, making an idol of the nation, the use of religion as a tool of the regime) and slapping a Bible verse on them. Essay II will take up what fascism actually is. For now it is enough to say that Christian nationalism, in the third use, is not Mussolini, and it is not the instrumental religion of a pagan state.

Refuse also the opposite error, which is often baptized as humility: the idea that because the church must not coerce faith, the magistrate must pretend that good and evil are private tastes. That is not two kingdoms. That is one kingdom, the state’s, with the church confined to feelings. Dropping the name “nationalism” will not save you from that error. It will only make the error easier to hide.

Under Christ, not as Christ

Christian patriotism loves a people. Christian nationalism adds the confession that this people, and their magistrate, stand under Christ. The two should travel together. Love without lordship becomes sentiment. Lordship without love becomes a program. Neither may confuse the nation with the people of God. We ask the nation to be just, not to be the church. We ask the church to preach Christ crucified, not to become a department of civic religion. We can say “God bless this land” as a prayer, not as a claim that this land is Zion.

The Son has been given the nations as an inheritance (Ps 2:8). He will have them. Our work is smaller and harder than seizing them for him. It is to tell the truth in our own place: that Jesus is Lord, that our neighbors are made in his image, that our magistrates will give an account, and that a free conscience is not the same thing as a lawless city.

That is ordered liberty under Christ. It is not a party platform. It is not a racial myth. It is not a call to make disciples at gunpoint. It is the old Christian refusal to let either Caesar or chaos have the last word. If the present age calls that Christian nationalism, so be it. We will define the term instead of fleeing it.

Later essays will take up fascism and its false cousins, the claim that America was never a Christian nation, particular peoples and ordered loves, the myth of neutrality, the state’s habit of co-opting religion, and how to argue these things without losing the gospel. This first piece has one burden: the name is not the danger. The dangers are idolatry on one side and pretended neutrality on the other. Love your people. Do not worship them. Honor the magistrate. Do not confuse him with Christ. Seek the peace of the city, and remember that the city is not the New Jerusalem.

Scripture quotations are from the Christian Standard Bible®, copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers.