If you’re not aware of the Substack Elephant in the Room, you should be. Run by two good Baptists, Jake Stone and Casey McCall, it’s a worthwhile venue for Baptist reflection. I’m particularly pleased that both are affiliated with Southern Seminary.
This week, Casey McCall wrote a post, “Magisterial Christian Nationalism Doesn’t Take Sin Seriously Enough.”
I want to give a hearty “amen” to the main point of its argument: McCall argues that modern-day “Christian Nationalism” applies its Reformed doctrine of sin to everyone except themselves: “Trust us,” they say, “we’ve finally figured out the formula to prevent the abuses of prior church-state syntheses.” History, however, tells a different story. Once the state becomes entangled in doctrinal disputes, bloody conflicts are rarely far behind. States that absorb into themselves matters as precious as religion are rarely eager to relinquish that power—especially when confronted with viewpoints that challenge the legitimacy of that synthesis. I think McCall’s analysis is right to view with suspicion any political ideology that promises a present-day hegemon, and I, personally, would identify it as a right-wing manifestation of “immanentizing the eschaton.”
On his main point, I’m in agreement with McCall—I think modern Christian Nationalism, to channel my colleague John Wilsey, is a utopian and Hegelian scheme. Its primary error lies in its claim to infallibility (though they would deny this charge). A secondary critique, though no less important than the primary one, is its fanciful detachment from contemporary political constraints. There is exactly zero political will to repeal the First Amendment or to advance proposals within its machinations. One can dislike a Hindu statue in Texas (as I do) and protest about it (a better protest should target the irresponsible upsurge in immigration that makes the desire for such statues possible), but unless laws are changed—and changed in ways that do not backfire on Christians—those statues will get built because of the First Amendment.
But other analysis in McCall’s piece risks falling prey to a serious and substantive critique of Baptist political theology—that disestablishment requires accepting religiously and culturally destructive forces in exchange for our own freedom. McCall writes,
“While many dream of bulldozing mosques and gay bars, few consider what they will do when the bulldozer turns toward First Baptist and Second Presbyterian. What happens when the hypothetical Christian prince has theological convictions about secondary matters? What happens when the authority at the top leverages government in pursuit of his own selfish aims?”
As best I can discern, McCall’s concern here is that, under a church-state union, those in power eventually turn their authority against those who do not conform to all its tenets. And, given Baptist history, where Baptists were often seen as subversives, as “incendiaries of the commonwealth,” there is a justified historical sensitivity to granting the government more, rather than less, power to police certain viewpoints and practices. So, in the interest of protecting everyone’s liberty, we’re led to believe that government must maintain total agnosticism on matters of religion and morality because, then, everyone is protected equally.
But I believe an error lurks here—one touching both religious liberty and moral reasoning.
To put it bluntly, I do not think accepting a broad framework of disestablishment depends on the hypothesis that substantive laws shuttering gay bars (under a conservative one) risk the state someday bulldozing our churches (under a progressive one).
This is where I think Baptists get themselves in a pit. The error concerns how we reason morally together as a society and how we think about the outer boundaries of what “pluralism” can reasonably absorb before it undermines order itself.
If I accept that it is unlikely that much of the population would agree with my Christian convictions, I would still need to find a way to argue against gay bars and Islam, since I believe homosexuality and Islam are both sinful and perpetuate moral harm in society. People may not agree with my doctrine of sin, but they cannot disagree with principles of moral harm if they are rightly articulated, self-evident, and convincing. And we have that ability through the natural law, God’s appointed means for allowing human beings to observe causes and effects, positives and negatives, through practical reason.
What does this mean practically? It means that if I want gay bars closed, and Islam’s influence curtailed (or eventually even expelled from society), I must make arguments that resonate with people who do not share my entire worldview. If rampant homosexuality sexualizes children, undermines the family, and spreads disease, legislation can address those realities under the category of public health. If certain Islamic practices involve child marriage, polygamy, the imposition of sharia law, or other threats to public safety—as seen in cases like the grooming scandals in the U.K.—then the state can restrict those practices on the basis of public order and safety.
Here’s why this matters.
If Christianity is true (as I believe it is), the moral revulsions it articulates are not accessible only to those who confess its creed. They may be appealed to through the grammar of natural law—through the shared rational apprehension of the good—without first inscribing Christianity itself as the exclusive juridical source of that law.
Such an appeal does not deny the supernatural foundations of morality or the authority of special revelation. Rather, it acknowledges the dual horizon through which moral truth is known: the horizon of general revelation, accessible to human reason through the created order, and the horizon of special revelation, given through Scripture and the redemptive disclosure of God. These two are not rivals but complements, ultimately converging in a unified moral reality grounded in the same divine authorship.
The point I appreciate about McCall’s post is not the idea of a thin legal reciprocity operating beneath it; it’s that Christian Nationalism relies on an anthropology and a political philosophy we should be suspicious of. I think McCall is right in his main argument, but he creates a false dichotomy in how he makes it. Nothing about disestablishment should cause us to accept the fallout of drag queen story hour as a “blessing of liberty,” as weaselly libertarianism would have us do.
In my view, the Baptist instincts of realism and non-utopianism regarding limited government should temper the sort of fantasies sometimes dressed up as “Christian prince” politics. The task of civil authority is not to indulge in theatrical displays of religious hypotheticals but to exercise sober, ordered governance within the limits of its competence, which necessarily entails natural law as the basis for civil morality.
A government committed to punishing genuine evil and preserving public order need not become an indiscriminate persecutor of religious minorities, nor should Baptists or Presbyterians assume that any assertion of moral judgment by the state inevitably turns next against them. Why? Well, because there is a vast asymmetry between the moral consequences of homosexuality and Islamic practice, on the one hand, and those of being a Baptist, on the other. People can observe real moral differences. The point is not sectarian triumphalism but a restrained, realistic account of civil authority ordered to justice and the common good.
One reason I am a Baptist is that its political theology works in all seasons—whether in triumph or exile. Its legitimacy does not hinge upon government adoption. It does not rely upon either dystopia or utopia for the church to do its work. It is a political theology fitted to the fallenness of this age: one that acknowledges ideological contestability, the legitimacy of statecraft under the rule of law, relies upon a shared moral grammar, and waits for the ultimate enactment of God’s kingdom—on God’s timing and on His terms.
This article originally appeared on X on March 13, 2026.
