Is Christian Nationalism Biblical?

Question 12046.

Is Christian nationalism biblical? My short answer is no, though the question deserves a great deal more care than the shouting on either side usually allows. Some of the people drawn to it are responding to something real, and telling them they are simply wicked will not help anybody.

So let me try to do three things. Set out what the term actually means, give its defenders their strongest case in their own terms, and then explain why I believe Scripture will not carry the weight they want to place on it.

What Christian nationalism actually claims

The label is used loosely, which is part of the trouble. At its mildest it means nothing more than a Christian caring about the moral health of his country. If that is all anyone meant by Christian nationalism, there would be no argument, because Scripture plainly expects believers to seek the welfare of the city where God has placed them, Jeremiah 29:7.

The stronger sense, and the one under discussion, is a programme in which the nation is understood as a Christian nation by covenant or by constitution, in which the civil authority is charged with upholding both tables of the Law, and in which Christian identity becomes a criterion for full participation in national life. Some advocates go further and speak of a Christian prince, of national repentance enforced by statute, of the church exercising cultural dominion before the return of the King.

That stronger sense is what I mean whenever I use the phrase in this article. It is a political theology, not a mood, and it needs to be assessed as one.

The best case its defenders make

Let me put their argument as strongly as I can, because a caricature proves nothing. They begin by observing that neutrality is a myth. Every legal order rests on some account of what is good, and when Christian assumptions are removed from public life they are not replaced by nothing, they are replaced by a rival creed with its own dogmas and its own heretics. Look, they say, at what has filled the vacuum in Britain over the last fifty years.

They point to the Old Testament, where nations are held accountable for their conduct and where the psalmist says blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, Psalm 33:12. They point to the historic Christian magistrate, to Alfred, to the Reformation settlements, to the Protestant constitutionalism that shaped English liberties. They ask why a Christian should regard those arrangements as sub-biblical when they produced the very freedoms we now enjoy.

They also make a pastoral argument. Families are being catechised by the state and by the screen. If the culture is going to disciple our children either way, why should Christians pretend that public life is a neutral space we can politely decline to enter? That is a serious point and I do not think it can be waved away.

Where the biblical argument breaks down

The first fracture appears when Christian nationalism reaches for Israel. Israel was a theocratic nation under a covenant God Himself instituted at Sinai, with divinely revealed civil sanctions and a divinely appointed land. No other nation in history has stood in that relationship, and no other nation has been offered it. The promises made to Israel were made to Israel.

The believer today is not under the Mosaic Law in any part, not because the Law was bad but because it was a covenantal package given to one people in one era, and Christ is the end of the Law for righteousness to everyone who believes, Romans 10:4. Lifting Deuteronomy’s civil code out of that covenant and applying it to Westminster or Washington is the same interpretive mistake, in a different coat, as claiming that the church has replaced Israel.

The second fracture is the New Testament’s own silence. The apostles wrote into an empire soaked in idolatry, slavery, infanticide and sexual chaos. They had every opportunity to sketch a programme for Christianising the state. Instead they told believers to pray for the emperor who was killing them, to pay their taxes, to live quiet and godly lives, and to make disciples. That is not an oversight. It is a strategy.

Two kingdoms and two kinds of weapon

Jesus told Pilate that His kingdom is not of this world and that if it were, His servants would fight, John 18:36. The reason His servants do not fight is not that fighting is always wrong. It is that this kingdom does not advance by that means. Paul says the same when he insists that our weapons are not fleshly but have divine power to demolish strongholds.

This is where Christian nationalism goes wrong at the deepest level. It is not simply mistaken about which era we are in, it is mistaken about what kind of power the church has been given. Swap persuasion for legislation and you may win a vote, but you cannot manufacture a single new birth. The Greek word for the church, ekklesia, describes those called out from the nations, not a nation gathered in.

My pretribulational premillennialism sharpens this. The church is not building the kingdom, it is announcing the King until He comes. Christ will reign from Jerusalem, and He will do it personally, visibly and by His own authority. Any programme of Christian nationalism that requires the church to establish that reign in advance has misread the timetable, and I have set out the wider framework in what Scripture says about world government.

Nationhood itself is not the problem

I want to be careful here, because opposing Christian nationalism is not the same as despising one’s country. Nations are God’s idea. He determined allotted periods and boundaries of dwelling place, Acts 17:26, and the nations appear in the new creation with their glory intact. Patriotism, properly understood, is a form of gratitude, and gratitude is never sinful.

Nor am I arguing for a church that keeps its opinions to itself. The prophets addressed kings. John the Baptist lost his head for telling Herod that his marriage was unlawful. Christians should vote, stand for office, campaign, argue in public and take the consequences. I have said more about that in whether Christians should be involved in politics.

The line Christian nationalism keeps crossing is the one between Christians acting as salt in the nation and the nation being redefined as Christian by law. The first is obedience. The second confuses citizenship of two different kingdoms and eventually damages both.

What Christian nationalism does to the gospel

Here is my pastoral concern, and it is the one that keeps me awake. When Christian identity is fused with national identity, the gospel stops sounding like good news for sinners and starts sounding like the manifesto of a faction. The unbeliever no longer hears an invitation to be reconciled to God, he hears a demand that he join our side in a culture war.

I have watched this happen. A man who might have listened to a Christian friend will not listen to a political opponent, and Christian nationalism hands him a reason to file us under politics. We are then arguing about flags when we should be talking about the cross. Whatever else that is, it is not evangelistic wisdom.

There is also the reverse damage. A movement that ties the church’s fortunes to a nation’s fortunes will find its faith wobbling when the nation declines, because it has been trusting something that was always going to disappoint. The believer whose hope is in the return of Jesus can watch a country change without losing his footing.

The American version and the British one

Most of the noise about Christian nationalism reaches Britain from the United States, where the debate is shaped by a founding narrative, by constitutional arguments and by a particular alliance between evangelicalism and party politics. Importing that debate wholesale into a British church is unwise, because our history is not theirs.

Britain has actually tried the establishment model, at length, and with enthusiasm. We had a state church with legal privileges, penal laws against dissenters, and magistrates enforcing conformity. My own Baptist forebears were fined, gaoled and excluded from the universities under it. That experiment did not produce a godly nation. It produced nominal religion and a persecuted minority who eventually gave this country its arguments for freedom of conscience, as I explain in my answer on religious liberty.

So when a British Christian tells me he wants a Christian nation, I want to ask which century he has in mind, and whether he has read what the church looked like when it had the sword in its hand.

Answering the charge of retreat

The most common reply to what I have written is that it counsels retreat, that I am handing the public square to whoever wants it. I understand the charge and I reject it. Refusing to seize the machinery of coercion is not withdrawal, it is choosing the weapons the New Testament actually issues.

Consider what the early church achieved without a single seat in the Senate. It took in abandoned infants, stayed in plague-struck cities when the wealthy fled, dignified women and slaves, and outlived the empire that persecuted it. That is cultural influence of the most durable kind, and it came from conviction rather than compulsion.

I want Christians in Parliament, in the schools, in the hospitals and on the councils, arguing for what is good and true as citizens. What I do not want is a theology that tells them their task is to install the kingdom before the King arrives. Christian nationalism asks the church to do a job God has reserved for His Son.

The dominion argument and the timetable it assumes

Underneath a good deal of Christian nationalism lies an eschatological assumption that rarely gets stated out loud. If you believe the church will progressively Christianise the world before Christ returns, then a programme of cultural and legal dominion follows quite logically. The theology drives the politics, not the other way round.

I do not hold that timetable, and I think Scripture argues against it. The New Testament expects difficulty to increase as the age closes, with people gathering teachers to suit their own passions and turning away from listening to the truth, 2 Timothy 4:3-4. Paul tells Timothy that in the last days there will come times of difficulty, and then tells him to preach the Word. The remedy offered is not political consolidation but faithful proclamation under pressure.

That is why Christian nationalism and pretribulational premillennialism sit so awkwardly together. If the King is coming to establish His reign personally from Jerusalem, and if His return is imminent and signless for the church, then our task in the interval is announced rather than engineered. I would rather hand my grandchildren a church that knows how to stand in a hostile culture than a set of laws that a later parliament will repeal in an afternoon.

What about Christian influence in law?

None of this means Christians should have no view about legislation. I want abortion restricted, I want marriage protected, I want children shielded from ideologies that will damage them. I argue for those things publicly and I do so as a Christian, openly, without pretending to a neutrality I do not possess.

The difference between that and Christian nationalism is the ground of the argument and the goal of the exercise. I argue from what is genuinely good for human beings made in God’s image, in terms my unbelieving neighbour can weigh, and my goal is a just society rather than a converted statute book. A law that restrains evil is a mercy to everyone under it, believer or not, and Romans 13 gives the magistrate exactly that remit.

Christian nationalism wants more. It wants the state to confess, to enforce worship, to make Christian profession a condition of full belonging. That is where I part company, because it asks the civil authority to do what only the Spirit of God can do, and it always ends by producing a class of people who conform without believing. We have had those. They filled our parish churches for centuries and they did not know the Lord.

There is one further practical warning I would give any church that finds this debate arriving at its door. Movements of this kind rarely stay theological for long. They acquire figureheads, they acquire enemies, and they begin to measure faithfulness by political alignment rather than by doctrine and holiness. I have seen congregations divide over a general election in a way they never divided over the person of Christ, and that is a spiritual failure whichever way the votes went.

Guard the pulpit here. A preacher who becomes predictable politically has lost the freedom to say the uncomfortable thing, and the uncomfortable thing is usually what the congregation most needs to hear. My aim in the pulpit is that a lifelong socialist and a lifelong conservative should both leave convicted by Scripture rather than confirmed in their party. That is harder than it sounds, and it is worth the effort. See also my answer on whether churches should be involved in politics.

So, now what?

If you find yourself attracted to Christian nationalism, examine what is drawing you. Very often it is grief, a proper sorrow at what has been lost, and grief is not a sin. But grief makes a poor architect. Take the sorrow to prayer and then ask whether the remedy you are reaching for is one the New Testament actually authorises.

Be involved as a citizen this year in some concrete way, and be involved as a witness in a way that costs you more. Speak to your neighbour about Jesus before you speak to him about the country. And when the argument flares up in your church, be the person who lowers the temperature and opens a Bible.

If our nation were converted household by household rather than legislated into conformity, would we have the patience for it?

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”

John 18:36, ESV

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie’s work on dispensationalism sets out with unusual clarity why the theocratic arrangements given to Israel do not transfer to any modern state, and J. Dwight Pentecost develops the prophetic framework in which the kingdom is established by the returning King rather than by the church. Lewis Sperry Chafer is worth consulting on the believer’s relation to the Mosaic Law, which is the hinge of much of this argument. Millard Erickson gives a balanced survey of evangelical positions on church and state for those who want to hear the alternatives argued fairly. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is the standard reference on Israel’s covenants and their literal fulfilment to ethnic Israel, which remains the strongest single objection to any theology that transfers national promises to another people.